Reference Materials for Migration 8.14 - Migrating to Microsoft Office 365

Cloud Directory Migration

Provision source users that were previously created in the target domain to Microsoft Office 365.

What will you achieve

• Accounts from source Active Directory domain will be listed in the Microsoft Office 365 Global Access List (GAL)
• Mail sent by cloud users to mailboxes from the source Exchange organization will be delivered successfully.
• Mail users will be created in Microsoft Office 365 and their ExternalEmailAddress property will point to corresponding mailboxes in the source organization.

How do you do that

This step is performed automatically by Microsoft Azure AD Connect as soon as mail-enabled users have been created in the target Active Directory domain by Directory Synchronization Agent.

How do you verify that step worked

1. Sign in to Microsoft Office 365 under any licensed user, open address book, select any user from the source organization and send a test message to that user.
2. Open the source user's mailbox, check that the message arrived successfully, and reply to it.
3. Make sure that reply message is delivered to the cloud recipient.
4. Repeat the above steps using any mailbox outside your organization to check that original and reply messages are delivered successfully.

Cloud Mailbox Migration

Once all accounts are provisioned to Microsoft Office 365 tenant and mail flow is established, migrate mailboxes from the source organization to the Microsoft Office 365 tenant and synchronize the calendars using Migration Manager for Exchange. After that perform a mailbox switch so that incoming mail start going to the Microsoft Office 365.

• Synchronize calendars
• Migrate mailboxes
• Perform mailbox switch

Synchronize calendars

What will you achieve

• Cloud mail users will be converted to mailboxes with valid licenses assigned (if not already converted).
• Users from the source organization and users from Microsoft Office 365 will be able to view each other's free/busy information and schedule meetings.

How to do that

Synchronize calendars using Migration Manager for Exchange as described step-by-step in Synchronizing Calendars.

How do you verify that step worked

1. Sign in to Microsoft Office 365 under any licensed user and create a test meeting.
2. Open any source mailbox and verify that the cloud user under which you created the meeting is busy at the time of the meeting.
3. Then create another test meeting in that source mailbox.
4. From Microsoft Office 365, ensure that the source user is busy at the time of the new meeting.

Migrate mailboxes

What will you achieve

• Cloud mail users will be converted to mailboxes with valid licenses assigned (if not already converted).
• Users from the source organization will be able to sign in to the cloud through SSO and access mailbox data migrated from their mailboxes.

How to do that

Migrate mailboxes using Migration Manager for Exchange as described step-by-step in Migrating Mailboxes.

How do you verify that step worked

1. Sign in to Microsoft Office 365 under any licensed user, open address book, select any user from source organization and send a test message to that user.
2. Open the source user's mailbox, check that the message arrived successfully, and reply to it.
3. Make sure that reply message is delivered to the cloud recipient.
4. Repeat the above steps using any mailbox outside your organization to check original and reply messages are delivered successfully.

Perform mailbox switch

Once calendars are synchronized and mailboxes are migrated to Microsoft Office 365, mailboxes can be switched using Migration Manager for Exchange. Mailbox switch allows all the Migration Manager for Exchange components to recognize the mailbox as switched and ensures that all new mail now arrives in the user’s cloud mailbox.

What will you achieve

All incoming mail will be delivered to Microsoft Office 365 mailboxes instead of on-premises mailboxes.

How to do that

Mailbox switch can be done either manually from the console or automatically by the Migration Agent for Exchange. This is configured through options in the collection that the mailbox is in. If you choose automatic switching, you can either schedule the mailbox switch operation for a specified time or have the agent switch each mailbox as soon as it is synchronized.

How do you verify that step worked

1. Sign in to Microsoft Office 365 under any licensed user, open address book, select user from source organization that has been switched and send a test message to that user.
2. Open any source user mailbox, open address book; select the same user as on step 1 and send another test message to that user.
3. Sign in to Microsoft Office 365 under the user to whom you sent messages on the above steps, ensure that messages arrived successfully and reply to them.
4. Ensure that reply messages are successfully delivered to recipients.

Additional information

For detailed information on mailbox switch, see the Mailbox Switch topic under the Mailbox Migration Process section in the Migration Manager for Exchange User Guide.

Complex Acquisition with a Hybrid

The goal of this migration is to merge objects from the source environment with dedicated Exchange forest into the target hybrid environment. This also entails a change of domain name for the objects that are migrated. The primary SMTP addresses for the objects from source environment are to be changed to match the target ones.

The typical use case for this scenario is when one company buys another, and the newly-acquired company needs to merge in its directory and mail system.

Migration Manager provides an ability to migrate users' mailboxes from the acquired company directly to Microsoft Office 365 without the need to firstly migrate them to on-premises Exchange organization.

Prerequisites

• The source environment uses a separate Exchange resource domain in addition to an account domain.
• The target environment is an Exchange hybrid deployment.

Procedure

Pre-migration task: Establish Mail Flow to Source Exchange Organization

1. On-Premises Directory Migration: Synchronizing Users
2. On-Premises Directory Migration: Migrating Passwords
3. On-Premises Mailbox Migration
4. Cloud Directory Migration
5. User Matching
6. Cloud Mailbox Migration

Establish Mail Flow to Source Exchange Organization

Since additional domains (for instance, source.local) will be used for mail redirection purposes, the corresponding Exchange connectors should be set up to establish proper mail flow.

Mail redirection from target to source on-premises organization

In order to enable mail redirection from the target to the source on-premises organization using @source.local namespace, add a new send connector on the target on-premises Exchange server with the following settings:

• Specify the mail delivery options depending on your organization specifics and Exchange Server version. For details, please refer to Microsoft documentation available here.

• Add a SMTP address space with the source.local domain.

Mail redirection from Microsoft Office 365 to source organization

Enabling mail redirection from Microsoft Office 365 to the source organization depends on the domain suffix that will be used for the cloud-related mail redirection purposes. If the domain name is publicly available (MX records are registered in public DNS and point to source Exchange server) no additional connectors are required.

In case the domain suffix is not publicly available, the corresponding connector in Microsoft Office 365 should be created to relay mail to the on-premises target Exchange server which, in its turn, should relay mail to the source Exchange server.