Office 365 Hosted Email Migration
Migrating your existing email to Office 365 is usually a relatively simple operation - but the procedure depends greatly on your existing type of email setup and configuration.
Before starting the migration process, it is crucial to have a complete list of users and email addresses in use, as well as understand how the existing mailbox folders will be moved to the hosted service and this depends greatly on the existing on-site configuration, and needs to be understood in detail prior to configuring the hosted service.
The required pre-requisits should also be checked at this time, primarily, Desktop and Laptops systems should be running Windows 7 or later with Office 2013 or 2016. Earlier versions are not supported.
A number of configuration changes have to be made to allow email to route directly to the Microsoft servers, rather than existing mailboxes or on-premises servers, and once these changes are made, email will start being delivered to the Microsoft hosting, rather than your existing mail servers.
This may result in users being unable to send email until their PCs or Laptops are reconfigured for the new service, but generally, incoming emails are not lost during the transition and it is easy to give users details to access their email either by using the excellent on-line webmail, or to connect their mobile phones to the new service so that critical emails can be handled.
Each users PC and Laptop typically requires a few minutes configuration which can be done on-site, or remotely as is most appropriate.
Once users are connected to the new hosted mailbox, their existing folders can be imported and synchronised. This is commonly done on each users PC for small businesses. The time taken to import the data varies according to the size of the users mailbox, the number of users being imported and the type and speed of Internet connection in use.