Top 5 Ways to Migrate From Exchange Server to Office 365

Cloud computing has emerged as a powerful way to store and process user’s data on remote server. Cloud computing provides on demand access to user’s data. Office 365 Suite is a cloud service that offers various applications on web like Office Online, which consist of MS Office applications like Word, Excel, Power Point and OneNote, Skype, Online Exchange, Onedrive.

Online Exchange is a hosted version of the local server by Microsoft namely; Exchange Server. By migration, we can transfer data from on-premise mailboxes like emails, contact, calendar, etc., to Online Exchange. Due to the cloud storage of Online Exchange, users can access their data whenever they need with just the mere availability of network connection.

User can purchase a license for storing their on-premise data over Online Exchange Server. Enterprise of any size can transfer their local data to cloud. There are different licenses that an enterprise can buy. According to the license purchased, users are allocated storage space on the server.

Benefits of Migrating Exchange Server Data to Office 356

• One can add user mailboxes to their Online Exchange as per the subscription license
• Microsoft handles the regular software update that takes place automatically in Online Exchange server
• One can use their data anywhere and anytime if they have network access
• No extra hardware and software required for maintaining the data

Different Ways to Migrate From Exchange Server to Office 365

An organization can migrate all of its accounts present in local Exchange Server to Online Exchange with the help of methods suggested below. There are five different ways to migrate from Exchange Server to Office 365:

Remote Move

• It migrates Exchange 2010 and later versions of Exchange Server
• Remote move have onboarding and Offboarding migrations
• In Onboarding Move, user can transfer mailboxes from on-premise Exchange to Online Exchange
• In Offboarding Move, user can transfer mailboxes from Online Exchange in Office 365 to on-premise server

Staged Migration

• Staged migration can migrate Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007
• It can migrate all organization user account to Office 365
• Using staged migration one can migrate batches of on-premise mailbox to Office 365
• This option is available for the customers who have Enterprise License of Online Exchange server
• Administrators can provide a list of user account in CSV file to migrate batch mailboxes to Online Exchange
• Staged migration can move more than 2000 user account from on-premise to Online Exchange

Cutover Migration

• Users can use cutover migration when they are working with Exchange 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013
• Cutover migration focuses on small to medium sized businesses to move their on-premise user accounts to Online Exchange sever
• This migration is very limited as it allows users to migrate 2000 and less mailboxes only
• Cutover migration uses RPC(Remote Procedure Call) for on-premise Exchange migration
• Cutover migration takes less time as compared to other migrations based on number of user accounts

Hybrid Migration

• In order to perform hybrid migration user must have Exchange 2003 or 2010
• This migration process is used to maintain on-premise data on online Exchange mailboxes in Office 365
• In this migration the online mailboxes can be moved back to on-premise Exchange Server
• Hybrid migration uses Global Address List (GAL) to migrate accounts in Online Exchange
• A centralized mailbox management can be availed using on-premise Exchange Admin Center (EAC)

IMAP Migration

• IMAP Migration also targets the users who may not be using Exchange in on-premise environment
• This migration takes place when users are working with IMAP 4 protocol configuration based Exchange environment
• EAC (Exchange Administration Centre) is used to move the content of IMAP messaging system to Online Exchange
• It can migrate only those user accounts which specified by the Admin in the CSV file during migration

Conclusion

The above-explained ways of migration From Exchange Server to Office 365 makes user understand the need and different environments from which migration can take place. Each way of migration has its own system requirements and conditions. An enterprise can use any of mentioned ways to migrate their data from Local Exchange server to Online Exchange as per their requirement.