Forum Discussion

john ernst's avatar
john ernst
Copper Contributor
Dec 18, 2017

simple Exchange 2007 to Office 365 migration

Hi,   I am trying to simplify my migration from Exchange 2007 on a SBS 2008 server to Office 365. I am hoping someone can tell me if the quick and dirty process I have put together is realistic a...
exchange
Hunter Willis's avatar
Hunter Willis
Iron Contributor
Dec 19, 2017

"Technically" yes, but per my reply, I believe this will not actually simplify your migration, and in fact will create more work in the long run. 

Rob Ellis's avatar
Rob Ellis
Bronze Contributor
Dec 20, 2017
I agree with Hunter - the approach & steps will work, but with a little more effort, you could do a cutover migration that will achieve the desired end result (all data in the cloud) with less work required from the end users, and less opportunities for user error.
  • john ernst's avatar
    john ernst
    Copper Contributor
    Dec 20, 2017

    I did my migration last night and had a few minor issues. I flicked the switch to go from my on site Exchange 2007 to Office 365 and that was pretty simple. Even the DNS entries were automated via the Admin Center (which I didn't expect so a nice surprise). 

     

    I did have a problem configuring the Outlook client to talk to Office 365 but a call to Microsoft fixed me up - we connected using IMAP and it all worked. I expected I could just create a new Outlook profile and go but apparently since I was using Outlook 2010 and 2013 I had to use IMAP instead.

     

    Then I imported my PSTs and tested - all working for my 4 users in around 5 hours. I'm still not sure why the Azure upload was taking so long but I just knew it wasn't an option for me.

     

    All in all, it went a lot better than I expected. But of course this was a very simple migration - 4 users with around 20GB total of data.

     

    And the help that Microsoft provided was outstanding - I know they get a lot of bad press and I've had my issues with them but I talked to two different people over the last couple of days and they were very good to deal with.

     

    I appreciate all the input on my questions  :)

    • Rob Ellis's avatar
      Rob Ellis
      Bronze Contributor
      Dec 20, 2017
      Glad to hear it went well for you!

      An observation - not sure why you would need to use IMAP for Outlook 2013?? It natively supports Office 365 - but connecting to it may have been impacted by autodiscover records on your local environment pointing back to EX2007.
      • john ernst's avatar
        john ernst
        Copper Contributor
        Dec 20, 2017

        Yes I was thinking the same - Outlook 2013 shouldn't have had a problem. In fact I was trying to configure one 2010 and one 2013 machine with Microsoft on the line but both were not connecting. But since it was late in the night and I wanted to have all users up and running this morning, I decided to go that route, at least for now.

         

        I can revisit at a later time.

         

        I will more than likely upgrade the 2010 clients to 2016 in the near future and I expect that to work right away.