Steps You Must Take Care of While Planning Office 365 Email Migration

Migration Email To Office 365 Made Simpler

Breaking down the migration process into three simple steps is the right way to go about it. First, here is how you plan your migration.

1. Know what you need to migrate.
2. Have a proper migration plan.
3. Execute the migration.

Besides, it is essential to have a robust email migration tool Office 365, to carry out the migration process.

Knowing What You Need To Migrate

Proper planning is critical for a successful email migration process. First, you should understand what items need reconfiguration or migration. While a crucial aspect of your Microsoft 365 email migration, it is also the most complex.

• Take care of your email boxes: The high-risk items include the user mailbox data comprising email contacts, email data, calendar, and tasks. Incorrect migration can inconvenience your users. Therefore, one should ensure no disruption of mailbox data, which guarantees no data loss and downtime.
• Check automated and shared mailboxes: Similarly, application mailbox data, including the automatic email responses, can be affected by the migration exercise. An expert migrator does not overlook this crucial aspect at any cost. The same is the case with shared mailboxes.
• Distribution lists need your attention: Organizations spend a lot of time creating distribution lists. Hence, taking care of such lists is crucial during an email migration. It saves you a lot of time.
• Reconfiguring DNS records: It ensures that the email starts flowing to your reconfigured email address rather than going back to the old system.
• Reconfiguring user devices: Generally, people access emails from multiple devices. Therefore, during mail migration to Office 365, one should reconfigure all such devices to the new mailboxes.

Having a Perfect Migration Plan

While ensuring proper migration: email to Office 365, there should be no downtime or data loss. Organizations can have users spread across multiple locations and time zones. In addition, different providers could host different email domains. Therefore, one should have a proper migration plan.

• A Proper Licensing Plan: Licensing skills are necessary for mapping old emails to the new Office 365 tenant. A hybrid licensing setup can help control your costs and make it easy.
• Protection from spam and malware: Your system would be at its most vulnerable position immediately after the migration. Securing your emails becomes critical. Hence, you should better work out your spam and malware filtering plans to enable users to discard their current email filtering service and reduce cost and complexity.
• User-by-user plan: Email migration is the ideal time to clean up your email clutter. Generally, regular users migrate using the same usernames and passwords. However, migration offers the opportunity to migrate ex-employees to shared mailboxes that do not require a specific license. It also helps to consolidate employees with multiple email addresses during the migration process. It makes your new email setup more secure than ever.
• Device Clients Plan: The migration team should catalog the existing devices and mail landscape before moving to new clients. It allows users to keep working with Office 365 using the same tools. Alternatively, they can switch to Outlook.
• Active Directory Plan: Organizations having an on-premise Active Directory Domain can synchronize it with Azure Active Directory. It ensures authentication for the Office 365 tenants and allows them to continue using their network log-on as a single identity source.
• Team Resources Plan: Having a Microsoft Partner as your email migration service helps you allocate the responsibilities appropriately and ensure that your post-migration activities continue with the same effectiveness.

Executing The Plan is Crucial

As you proceed with the Office 365 email migration, your regular users should not notice any difference due to the process taking place in the background. Therefore, you can smoothly ask them to start using Office 365 using their same user credentials as you reach the cut-over point.

The migration action keeps running in the background without disrupting the regular routines. Finally, the DNS records are changed to make Office 365 the live email service. It automatically connects Outlook on the Windows devices to the Office 365 account and synchronizes data automatically. It also ensures an hourly sweep to ensure that no emails are delivered to the old account. In case they are, it copies them into the new Office 365 account.

Final Words

Office 365 Email migration ensures the security of your emails and makes them accessible from a single location. It proves helpful during mergers and acquisitions. Also, synchronizing data and archiving emails make it easy to retrieve old emails to resolve outstanding disputes. Organizations should diligently follow the steps discussed above to ensure that the mail migration to Office 365 is as smooth as possible.