Resolve how Enterprise Office 365 is migrated

For now, email is a key business tool for most companies, but for e-mail, there are flaws in the company's strategic management. As a result, many companies are reluctant to run mail servers 24x7 to focus on Microsoft Exchange's central coordination and efficient address management capabilities.

Microsoft has entered the hosting/Cloud email host market, and Microsoft Office 365 is the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's company. In contrast, Office 365 migration becomes particularly important, and e-mail communication is particularly critical, so you must ensure that the Office 365 migration is secure. Companies need to plan for Office 365 migrations carefully, testing and validating each step.

Checking e-mail policies

The main commercial e-mail policies currently include standard (internal Apache or network) mail hosts, Exchange hosts, or running internal Exchange servers. The most appropriate migration methods are different in policy, and in some cases may mean migrating e-mail users in different ways, different tools.

The first issue to consider for an Exchange user is a SharePoint migration. Consider whether the company has customized SharePoint or that its reseller has customized it on their behalf. If customization is done, the company either runs SharePoint Online or runs SharePoint in Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud. Some custom tools (Avipoint, Metavis, Quest, and so on) migrate existing SharePoint Structures-(in most cases) metadata-to SharePoint Online.
For companies that get exchange through a reseller, the first step should be to contact the reseller to see if the reseller has specific tools to facilitate Office 365 migrations. Microsoft has its own set of online resources and tools, but those companies that work with distributors tend to be more knowledgeable about assembly and have special tools to facilitate migration. In addition, Microsoft encourages resellers to switch from providing small business servers to providing Office 365 toolkits.

The second step is to establish an Active Directory link for Office 365 and other applications that use single sign-on (SSO). The challenge, then, is to use active Directory with a federated single sign-on to Office 365 while supporting other applications. Companies that do not use Active Directory may now not want to participate at all, and are considering migrating to Office 365. At the very least, that means losing the cloud-only model they're looking for. If a company wants to implement a single sign-on, especially if the company is preparing to migrate to the Cloud-only architecture, the company may want to explore the single sign-on model (Centrify, Okta, Ping) of other popular Microsoft applications.

If the enterprise has acquired managed Exchange from a third-party provider, it is a good idea to check the host documentation to see how the host document supports the migration of managed services to exchange, and to consider Office 365 migration as an exchange migration. The challenge for organizations is that an effective management process for internal Exchange migration may not be appropriate for all managed versions. User survey reports show that users ' managed Exchange providers generally do not support their migration to Office 365, so don't expect to get too much help from providers. However, many of the Third-party tools listed earlier to promote SharePoint migration or SSO can help.

By outputting additional data in the form of e-mail messages and PST files (in Outlook), you can facilitate the migration of individual users by entering into Office 365 again. This approach has almost always worked, but conversion is required between Exchange managed versions and Office 365. It is best to finish on weekends or during holidays, because, for several days without email, filling and validating new settings, users will not be affected too much.

Problems with Office 365 migration

For companies that do not use Exchange, migrating Office 365 faces enormous challenges. In this case, you can complete the migration of Office 365 in two steps. First, establish Office 365 SharePoint and sso/Active Directory hosting Exchange environments as needed, and the second step is mailbox migration. The first step is to consult the books and tutorials on setting up exchange standards, and to spend some time building and testing Office 365 configurations with some fake mailboxes and user accounts.

It's really hard for users to migrate from POP3 or IMAP clients to Office 365. For Outlook users, creating a PST file for transferring messages and address books is fairly straightforward. Moving this information can be difficult for users who do not use Outlook. Users who use multiple e-mail clients may have problems with too little compatibility, and the mailbox translation tool solves the problem by using different features and different mail clients involved, and the mailbox conversion tool plays a different role. The best advice for users is to keep Outlook licenses secure, migrate to Outlook first, check the results of the migration, and then migrate from Outlook to Office 365 using the procedure described above.

The most important thing to migrate to Office 365 is to test, migrate, and validate each step of the migration process. There is no tool or procedure that should be applied to real-time data, and if it is not checked, it is first populated with a set of test accounts that represent e-mail samples and address book entries.

Also remember that the last step is to verify messaging settings and shared resources (Active directory or other SSO, SharePoint, folder, and file structures, and so on) before working with live data. Migrating users, such as departments, can also reduce the burden of migration, enabling users who interact frequently to complete the migration at the same time. Planning is a great way to ensure a successful migration, and many users think Office 365 is worth the effort.

"Responsible Editor: Dan TEL: (010) 68476606"