Migrate Exchange On Premise 2013 to Office 365- Best Method Explained

With the introduction of Office 365 and the wide variety of excellent features it offers. It’s not a surprise that migrating to Office 365 is becoming the new trend these days. Old exchange servers like Exchange 2013 being on their last extended support period isn’t really ensuring too. In this article, we will be discussing how to migrate exchange on-premise 2013 to Office 365.

Now let us take a look at the different methods that we can use to do the same while ensuring the data is kept safe during the migration process.

Reasons to Migrate Exchange on Premise 2013 to Office 365

Before we actually get into the migration procedures, let us look at some of the common reasons that tempt users to do it in the first place.

One of the major reasons why a user or organization might want to switch to office 365 is because of how cheaper it is to maintain. This is contributed due to a variety of reasons. On Office 365 the security updates and maintenance are taken care of by Microsoft. This allows fewer working hours for the IT admins and allows them to concentrate on other things. It also ensures that the Office server is always up to date and all the security vulnerabilities are patched as soon as they are discovered.

Microsoft also ensures the user an uptime of 99.9%. This means your data is available to you almost all the time. Now let us peek into different ways that you can use to perform migration.

Before we start have a look at Office 365 migration Checklist.

On Prem Exchange 2013 to Office 365 Migration Using Manual Method

There are a couple of manual methods that we can use for the same. Let us go through each of them one after the other.

Cutover Migration

Using this method only up to 2000 mailboxes can be migrated at once. After the limitation of 2000 mailboxes, it simply fails to migrate. Even tho the max limit is 2000 Microsoft themselves suggest only migrating 100 to 150 users at a time. This is since migrating more than that increases the chances of failure and ends the migration process.

Steps to Use Cutover migration

• Make a migration batch online
• Open EAC and navigate to recipient>migration. Then define the migration endpoint and select the option Outlook everywhere.
• From the drop down menu, select migrate to exchange online option.
• Activate the mailboxes and finalize the migration batch.
• Go through with the complete Office 365 setup and finish the Cut-over DNS too.
• Point the MX records to the new Office 365 account and update the DNS.
• Create a new Outlook profile and import the required data and settings
• Once the migration is finished delete the migration batch and allocate the required licenses to the mailbox.

IMAP Migration

You can just migrate emails using this manual method. Only a maximum of 500,000 emails which combined have a size of less than 35MB can be migrated using this method at once. The admin also has to manually create a CSV file of the users that want to migrate.

Steps for IMAP Migration

• Create users on Office 365 after adding an exchange server as an accepted domain to allot individual mailboxes to the users.
• Also obtain FQDN and set up the firewall as per need.
• Provide admin access and import cmdlets to access PowerShell after logging in.
• Create a CSV with attributes such as user mailbox, user name and password.
• Then Run the command below to use endpoint to migrate exchange on premise 2013 to Office 365.

New-MigrationEndpoint -IMAP -Name IMAPEndpoint -RemoteServer imap.contoso.com -Port 993 -Security SSL

Allot a name for the migration batch specify connection settings and make a CSV file with the user’s mailbox which is used for migration.
Point the MX record towards Office and delete the IMAP batch after the migration process is over using the command below.

Remove-MigrationBatch -Identity IMAPBatch1

Limitations of Manual Methods.

Some of the limitations of the manual methods are as follows.

• There are limitations on the number of mailboxes that can be migrated.
• There are also limitations on the size of data that can be migrated.
• Some manual methods can only migrate certain types of data.
• Professional Methods to Migrate Exchange On premise 2013 to Office 365

Professional Exchange to Office 365 Migration Tool overcomes all the limitations of the manual method. It also brings new and intuitive features to the user which helps to make the migration process much easier. Here are the steps to use the professional tool.

Install and open the tool after downloading it from the above link
Provide the source as Exchange Sever and the Destination as Office 365.
Now, go to the source tab and select the exchange tab version as 2013
Next, go to the destination tab enter the required credentials and verify permissions.
Among the 3 options provided select the one, you prefer to import the users into the tool.
Finally, validate all the permissions and click on the start migration button to start the migration process.

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Conclusion

In this article, we have taken a look at different ways that you can use to migrate exchange on premise 2013 to Office 365. The manual method has limitations when performing the migration process. To have an easy and hassle free experience we recommend using the above mentioned tool.