Migration from Hosted Exchange (Hybrid) to M365 Classic Outlook Client Problems and Solutions
Hello Everyone, I'm a tech who started on a 8088 processor in the 80's. Not mentioning the Vic20 and C64 since that hardly seem relevant! I'm posting here to hopefully help the next person with the issues I've had over the last few weeks. My client had to port his email from a provider with an on-perm Exchange server in a Hybrid setup with M365 to his own M365 environment. I expected this was to be about 3 hours of work for me - setup M365 environment, plan the cut-over window, update the Outlook clients on each PC. It ended up being roughly 20 hours of my time and at least 10 hours of dedicated time for my client. For those wanting to jump directly to what mostly fixed it use this link, it should get you past the dreaded "an encrypted connection to your mail server is not available" when trying to add the mail account into a clean profile. Use https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/classic-outlook-troubleshooters-086e3d66-5404-4034-9cc5-545909dcc166 and pick "Classic Outlook Profile Setup Troubleshooter" Most hits are going to tell you its an autodiscovery issue, but if you're reading this I'm going to assume you've already confirmed that. Our issue was some ghost configuration, only on the PCs previously setup for mail on the old server. A new PC could add the same account without issue. Some of the research suggested this would not happen if the proper Microsoft migration process is followed to move the account - but in our case the previous provider was unable to perform the migration. I'll skip over the research we tried along the way, such as New Outlook Profiles, Registry entry changes, MS Personal users with the same email as MS Business Users, Autodiscover problems (including concerns that the base website for the client was offering invalid data), and so on. After each hit where we applied a fix we again had to try adding the mail to the profile, and each time we sat watching the little circle for up to 5 minutes only to get the same error. Now, once we found the link above - which did not come up in most searches - things got better, but not 100%. We added the profile ok but then Outlook gave a permission error while starting. To fix that, the user signed in must have administrative access and you use File Explorer to navigate to the folder identified in the error. In our case it was in folders kept under \Windows\System32\. When prompted that we need to grant permanent access we said yes. In our case this is where Outlook was storing the ost files. That worked for most of the clients, but we had one additional issue where the error was pointing to a folder that didn't exist. Just creating the folder was not enough, the final fix was to hold CTRL-SHIFT down while opening Outlook to start in administrative mode to allow it to create the ost file in the newly created folder. Finally 3 weeks after our cut over window, while the client had to use OWA, we were able to get outlook running. This was critical for my client because they did not have access to the mail history since the migration didn't happen - they had to open a copy of their PST in Outlook and use mail in OWA and constantly bounce back and forth. I hope this helps someone avoid the pain we went though!Moving Exchange Account Source Account
I have a very complex environment I'm hoping someone might jump start my search. We have two domains syncing to Entra ID. One domain is a resource forest where our Exchange environment sits. That domain contains disabled stub accounts synced to our primary domain where the actual user accounts sit. The source for all EXO mailboxes are the stubs in the resource forest. Those accounts are kept in sync using FIM 2008. We're wanting to decom that entire resource environment and move all of the attributes to the primary domain. The resource domain schema is the last version of Ex 2016. The primary domain schema is Ex 2010 SP1. I know my first step is to update the primary schema, however, has anyone encountered a situation like this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
How to Backup Emails in Outlook?
If you want to backup emails in Outlook, the easiest and most reliable way is by using the Mails.Daddy Email Backup Tool. I’ve used it personally to export my Outlook.com emails to formats like PST, EML, and MBOX with zero data loss. It connects via IMAP and lets you back up selective folders or the entire mailbox. Whether you're planning to backup Outlook emails to a hard drive or migrate them to another email client, this tool is fast, secure, and beginner-friendly. For anyone asking how to backup emails in Outlook, I strongly recommend trying this — it’s a smooth experience and saves a lot of time.
Standard Operating Procedures in OneNote - Best Method?
Hi, I've been in business for over 18 years, with 6 employees. We have over 300 policies and procedures that have been written and rewritten. They have always been stored on our Sharepoint server in a regular file folder structure that syncs to our computers. Because of it, nobody uses them for they are difficult to find. Sometimes you don't know the name of what you're looking for, other times its an SOP that could be under production or finance. The system has just never worked. I'm currently implementing a system in OneNote. I have it set up where our 9 primary areas are all tabs. There then exists sections for checklists, specific procedures, and then one large 20-30 page manual for that department that discusses in detail everything that needs to be known. An example is in the 23-page Marketing Manual, there are five paragraphs explaining what brand colors are, why they are important, and why we can't stray from them. It then has a few links to reference other documents, one of them is our Branding Sheet that is a Word document, stored inside OneNote. OneNote is also great because it's desktop software that each of our computers has, every single document can be searched at once, you can utilize links to any part that you'd like, you can utilize tags, and you can store the referenced document inside OneNote (so I don't have to deal with somebody changing the file name or somehow breaking the link to the server. I haven't released it yet, but my employees say they would use it if it were easy. As I'm slowly going through and entering the SOPs into OneNote, I'm finding minor issues with my system in OneNote The formatting is VERY limited. So making a great SOP is not as easy as it is in Word Once I have everything in there, I dont think I can get it back out in an editable fashion. I can print the .pdf but it's not like it's a Word document that can be moved around You can't really set permissions on it. I can lock pages, which would work, but I'd prefer permission on different areas Getting everything in there is going to be challenging enough, then I have to go back and link everything. Before I spend too much time organizing these SOPs and copy/pasting them into OneNote, I was hoping that somebody has gone down this road before and can either advise me away from OneNote to another product or offer advice as to why I should keep going down my path. Thanks in advance. Aaron
Adding Proxy Addresses in AD Before Tenant-to-Tenant Migration Cutover
We're in the process of migrating users from another M365 tenant into our own, which is synced with on-prem AD. Before the cutover, we'd like to add the proxy addresses from the source tenant to our AD and have them sync to the cloud once the domain is added to our M365 tenant. Would this work as expected, or are there any potential issues to be aware of?Microsoft O365 Auto Login
I want to set up auto-login for the O365 desktop application. When a user logs in to an on-premises AD-joined device, the O365 application should automatically log in with their AAD credentials. I have an AAD subscription, and user sign-in is configured with password hash synchronization. Additionally, I have enabled SSO on the Azure AD Connect application. Please note that the end-user devices are not Azure AD-joined.
Remove On Premises exchange Hybrid and go fully Online
Hello, I currently have a scenario where there is a Hybrid Exchange environment with 1 server. All my mailboxes have been migrated online. I would like to completely remove dependency on local AD and I do not care about AD synchronization. How do I "tell" the O365 tenant not function on it's own so that I can manage 100% from 365 Administration? I do understand that my MX and other DNS records will need to be changed. Are there any solid guides out there on decommissioning the on premise exchange server. I want to do this with the least impact on users. Thanks, Keith
