Proven Methods To Migrate To The Cloud Using Office 365!
When moving to the cloud, one has to consider several factors; however, by adopting MS Office 365 eco-system, this path can be smoothened.
The process of moving to the cloud has to be taken seriously. If businesses think of money-saving during this transition to Office 365, it is impossible; however, a proper process and planning from a quality infrastructure to the cloud eco-system is a significant undertaking.
So, Microsoft is putting its efforts into encouraging all types of companies to start migrating operations to the cloud, especially when Office 365 is available and contributing the most to make this transition smoother. Office 365 is designed from the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft Lync Server and SharePoint 2010 cloud versions. Some of the subscriptions for Office 365 include the advantage of accessing Office Pro Plus and Office web apps of Microsoft.
With numerous Microsoft Office 365 products, covering the whole moving transition is a big challenge. Though now, it is time to check out how to perform multiple everyday tasks using the Office 365 eco-system and think of specific issues you may encounter.
Names Of Domain
A common question about this process is how it will impact the domain names of a company. Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange are entirely dependent on the Active Directory. So, how your company's domain names are impacted depends upon your selection of maintaining an on-premise Active Directory or utilising an identity federation.
So, if you decide to keep hosting the Active Directory, but are not interested in handling the hassle of implementing the identity federation, choose Office 365 to manage domain names from the partial redelegation process. The company will enjoy ownership of its domain name; however, specific functions like web hosting and email get redirected to the servers of Office 365.
Here Microsoft itself designs the redelegating process of the domain to utilise Office 365 without any pain. Using the administrative console of Office 365, you can easily include domain names. This process makes it very easy to involve existing terms of the domain in Office 365.
Before adding a domain to Office 365, you must authenticate your domain ownership by giving your credentials sign-in for the domain host or registrar.
Groups & Users
You must follow some acclimatisation to work with groups and users in the Office 365 eco-system. So, instead of exposing the computers and active directory users' consoles, Microsoft offers users an administrative console interface with a mechanism to manage and make user accounts.
There are several solutions to manage the accounts of users from Microsoft. If you already own the Active Directory eco-system, the best choice is synchronising the Active Directory. It collaborates with the MS Office 365 cloud and the local Active Directory of your company. After that, you can keep using the present infrastructure of Active Directory and Active Directory management tools.
The greatest thing that one must remember about the synchronisation of Active Directory is that; this process works in one way only. The Active Directory contents get copied to the cloud; however, your changes will not be copied to the local Active Directory. However, technically you can change the accounts of users via the cloud interface, and these changes will not be copied to the local Active Directory. Moreover, it will be overwritten if you use the synchronisation process.
The second option to manage the accounts of users is to utilise identity federation. The central concept of identity federation is to retain control of your Active Directory eco-system. By applying Active Directory Federation Service version 2.0, businesses can allow users to log into the cloud from their credentials to Active Directory easily.
So, if you plan to synchronise Active Directory, Microsoft recommends enabling users to get identity federation. Though to use synchronisation of Active Directory by not allowing the identity to federation, one has to redelegate the domain as it was narrated earlier.
Begin In The Cloud
It must be noted that utilising Office 365 for deploying the local Active Directory is not the prerequisite. Similarly, one can use the on-premise Office 365 deployment to move to the cloud, but only if you do not run the on-premise apps that need access to the Active Directory.
With an administrative interface, one can make accounts for users directly in the Office 365 eco-system but avoid doing it if you conduct directory synchronisation. Using a Web-based wizard, you can make accounts for users individually. The administrative console allows one to create high-volume accounts by crowding the CSV file with the information of user accounts and importing it. You can download the blank or the sample CSV file from the administrative console.
Way to Migrate Present Users
Justice 365 enables us to make new accounts for users in the cloud; one can also move his present users' company users 365 integrates Exchange Server 2010. Though mailbox data gets stored in the mailbox server, the mailbox is still known for having Active Directory quality. Simply like that, moving an account also intends to migrate a user's mailbox.
For migrations, one can make a coexistence scenario in which you include users with on-premise mailboxes on Exchange though other users' mailboxes are in the cloud.
That said, users' migrations to Office 365 are meant as migrations of mailboxes. So, keeping coexistence aside, Office 365 stands by two kinds of migrations of mailboxes for which one should conduct an IMAP: Internet message access protocol migration and migrations of on-premises Exchange.
Migrations Based On IMAP
While migrating the data mailbox from Exchange 2000, Exchange 5.5 or the mail system of a non-Exchange, you should utilise the IMAP migration. Though the migration process is quite simple, it would require a little preparation from you.
So, before performing the IMAP migration process, you should make Exchange mailboxes of each user whose data is in the mailbox you need to migrate. Moreover, there will also be a need to make the CSV file using email, user ID and Password for every mailbox that requires migration. After assembling the needed data, choose the email migration in Outlook Web App to conduct the actual migration.
Currently, Office 365 is available in the beta testing phase, and it is unclear how many users can be migrated effectively. From the migration interface of email, you can learn that there should be less than one thousand mailboxes; however, the documentation shows that you should conduct large-scale migrations via batch-based mailbox migration. This documentation implies that one should keep batches limited to 2500 mailboxes.
Migrations Of Exchange Server
Just like the IMAP migration process, the Exchange server migration migrates data of mailboxes to the cloud. This process migrates all the distribution groups, contacts and messages.
The migrations of the Exchange Server can be done in two ways. The simple migration migrates mailboxes of Exchange instantly, but the staged migration moves mailboxes into subsets. When there is a coexistence scenario, you should use directed migration.
To conduct the simple migration process, you should first specify the type of migration. Here, you can select to run Exchange 2007 and the migration or choose Exchange 2003, then migration. The only significant difference here is in the Exchange 2007, which utilises the Autodiscover feature to detect the connection settings automatically. The Exchange 2003 alternative requires you to describe these settings manually.
As obviously, this process can take time taking to complete. It is mainly true with those having several mailboxes. Office 365 utilises two synchronisation solutions to balance these mailboxes during the process.
When starting synchronisation, the data in the mailbox first gets copied to the cloud. Then, Exchange conducts a complementary synchronisation every 24 hours. This synchronisation makes a copy of all new data mailboxes to the cloud.
Once the migration of all mailboxes is completed, the Exchange sends the email indicating the completion of the migration process. There are two attachments in the message. One attachment is MigrationErrors.csv which lists those mailboxes to which migration fails. The second attachment carries an attachment, MigrationStatistics.csv, which contains details of the total migrated items.
The MailboxStatistics.csv file comes with a password for every user as they need it while logging into the cloud, but once they log in, they should change this password immediately.
For any query related to Office 365 migration, contact Microsoft Office expert Server Consultancy through email at info@serverconsultancy.co.uk or call us at 0203 727 2000
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