Moving to Office 365 (Part 1)
It took us a total of four days to migrate our email server from BPOS to Office 365, two days beyond our planned weekend migration.
This post was co-authored by Dino Caputo of enableUC.
Cloud services hold great promise and certainly Office 365 is a leading consideration for many organizations looking to move to the cloud. In today's business climate, any organization already has email, which means that choosing Office 365 for email and other services will involve a migration from an existing email platform to the hosted Exchange platform that is part of Office 365.
This is the first part in the story of how enableUC moved from Microsoft BPOS to Office 365.
Is This Really a Migration?
According to Microsoft, all existing BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) customers will have their data migrated to the newer Office 365 platform between September 2011 and 2012. This process should be relatively painless for end users.
We at enableUC were already using Microsoft BPOS for our email, so we could have simply done nothing besides wait. However, when it comes to new technology, we are impatient and feel the need to try new things so we can share our experiences with our clients--and by doing so hopefully help others avoid some pain. Given this, last weekend we embarked on a manual migration process; enableUC is a small organization with less than 50 mailboxes, so we felt we could complete the process over the weekend and hopefully have virtually zero "downtime".
Many organizations considering Office 365 will be looking to migrate from an on-premise Exchange environment to the cloud-based Office 365. Some of the challenges they encounter will be similar to the ones we faced, and some will be different. (We intend to detail the migration process from on-premise Exchange to O365 in a subsequent article.)
A Quick Overview of Office 365
As a quick review, Office 365 includes:
* Exchange, which provides email and voice mail services;
* Sharepoint, which provides document collaboration features (team sites) along with intranet and Internet site hosting, and which can include complex automated workflow automation;
* Lync, which provides instant messaging, presence, audio calling (between other Lync users), desktop sharing, desktop videoconferencing and web conferencing;
* Lync optionally can provide audio conferencing, including callers joining from normal PSTN phones, but this requires working with a third-party audio conferencing provider (a list of which is available in the Microsoft Marketplace); and,
* Office Web Apps, which are browser-based "light versions" of the familiar desktop Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications.
For more of our general thoughts on Office 365, see Office 365: First Impressions and Co-editing Confusion.
Focus on Email
In this article we will focus on the process of migrating BPOS email to Office 365 email. This was a five-step process:
1. Saving existing mail data
2. Moving our domain from BPOS to Office 365
3. Setting up new accounts in Office 365.
4. Restoring mail data
5. Enabling mobile devices
