In recent times many organizations are releasing that moving an on-premise server to Office 365 has a lot of benefits while being user-friendly. In this article, we will be looking at o365 migration steps and the different methods that we can use for the same.
Exchange To O365 Migration Step By Step Using Manual Methods
Some of the most popular manual methods to migrate your data are as follows.
Cutover Migration
This method can be used by users who have less than 2000 mailboxes to migrate at once. It is compatible with different versions of exchange servers such as Exchange server 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013.
Steps To Use Cutover Migration
- Start by making a migration batch online
- To do this go to Exchange Admin Center and navigate to recipient>migration. From here define the migration endpoint and choose the option Outlook everywhere.
- In the next drop-down menu that appears select the option migrate to exchange online option.
- After this enable the mailboxes and finalize the migration batch.
- Finish the Office 365 setup and also set up Cutover DNS.
- Change where the MX record is pointed to the new office 365 account and update the DNS.
- Now open a new Outlook profile and import the data and settings to it.
- Once the process is completed assign the required licenses to the mailboxes and delete the migration batches.
IMAP Migration
Using these O365 Migration steps only emails can be migrated. All other data such as contacts, calendars, etc should be migrated separately. Only 50,000 emails that have a size of less than 35MB can be migrated using this method.
Steps To Use IMAP Migration
- First, add the exchange server as an accepted domain to allot individual mailboxes to the users.
- Create the required users on Office 365.
- Attain FQDN and also set up the firewall to allow the migration process.
- Allow admin access and import cmdlets to use PowerShell.
- Create a CSV file with data regarding the user mailbox, user name, and password.
- In the final o365 migration step run the command given below to start the migration process.
New-MigrationEndpoint -IMAP -Name IMAPEndpoint -RemoteServer imap.contoso.com -Port 993 -Security SSL
- Give a name for the migration batch for the connection setting and create a CSV file with the user’s mailbox used for the migration.
- Finally, change where the MX record points and remove the IMAP migration batch once the migration process is completed using the command given below.
Remove-MigrationBatch -Identity IMAPBatch1
Problems With Manual O365 Migration Steps
Even though using the manual method is free and open to use for anyone there are some problems that you could encounter while using these. Some of the common ones are as given below.
- For some of the manual methods, there are limitations on the number of mailboxes that can be migrated at once.
- In many of the manual methods, there are restrictions on the size of the data that you can migrate.
- Only certain categories of data can be migrated using some methods
O365 Migration Steps For Professional Tool
As you can see from the above there are a lot of limitations when using the manual method. Hence a professional tool will help you out a lot in a situation like this. Best Exchange Migration Tool is one of the most professional tools you can use to migrate your Exchange server to Office 365. It offers the users a lot of advanced features that allow them to easily perform the same. Now let us look at the steps that we have to use for the same.
- Open the tool and go to the setup section.
- From here select the source as Exchange Server and the destination as Office 365.
- From the workload section select the category of data you want to migrate.
- You can also apply a date filter to filter the data before migration if needed.
- Now go to the source tab from the left menu and enter the details of the exchange server like server version, admin email, admin password, active directory IP, and exchange server IP. Once all the correct information is entered click on the validate button.
- Now go to the destination tab and enter the admin email and application id of the destination account and click on the validate button.
- In the users tab, there are multiple options that you can use to get the details of the users. Click on the fetch users option to get the details of the users automatically from the source.
- You can also get the users manually by downloading the template provided and then importing it back into the tool.
- Once all the users are imported into the tool we have to map the source account to the destination accounts.
- This can either be done one by one or in batches using a CSV file.
- You can also assign priority to accounts that you want to migrate first.
- Once done click on the validate button and click on the start migration button.
The migration can be tracked from the migration tab. Once the migration process is completed you can download a summary report. Using this report make sure all the data is migrated. If there are any data that failed you can retry migration for that file.
You can also perform delta migration to migrate any new data.
Also Read: Best Office 365 migration checklist for beginners
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed different o365 migration steps and different methods that you can use for the same. We have seen that using the manual method has its own limitations. For a smooth and easy migration setup, we recommend using the above-mentioned tool.