Explore What You Need to Know About a Cutover Email Migration to Office 365!

Cutover Email Migration is a simple solution for Exchange migration for small as well as large size of business to move to Office 365. To perform cutover migration, organization should have less than 2000 mailboxes in size. There must be Outlook Anywhere service as well as Identity Management in cloud. In the following the session, we will discuss what you need to know about a cutover email migration to Office 365.

Important Things to Know Before Cutover Migration

Before starting the cutover migration to Office 365, users need to consider the following cutover migration Office 365 prerequisites:

• Users can migrate the complete organization’s mail to Office 365 over few days and can manage the account of user in Office 365.
• Maximum 2000 mailboxes can be easily transferred to Office 365. Moreover, it is recommended to migrate 150 mailboxes.
• Primary domain name should be utilized as on-premises Exchange organization that should be accepted as domain owned in Office 365 organization.
• Once the migration is completed, every user has its own on-premises mailbox on Exchange and that will be the new user on Office 365.

Affect on the Users

After on-premises and Office 365, organizations are ready for cutover migration; post- setup tasks could affect the users.

• Administrators must configure system
  It should be checked that the systems are properly updated as well as properly set up for utilization of Office 365. These permit users to utilize credentials of local users to login to Office 365 from desktop application. Users with the permission of installation of applications can be updated and set their desktop. After the updations, users can send email from Outlook 2007, 2010, or 2013.

• Delay in routing of emails
  Emails send to on-premises users, whose mailbox were moved to Office 365 until MX record is changed, these are routed to on-premises Exchange mailboxes unless the MX record is modified.

Working of Cutover Migration

There are some steps involved which use PowerShell to perform a cutover migration to Office 365. The steps are mentioned below:

• The administrator communicates the upcoming modifications for users and verifies the domain ownership with registrar of domain.
• The administrator organizes the servers and generates empty mail for enabling the security groups that are in Office 365.
• Administrator connects to on-premises email system of Office 365.
• Admin moves mailboxes and verifies the migration.
• Permit licenses to users of Office 365.
• Administrator should configure the domain for routing email directly into Office 365.
• Admin verifies the changes in routing and then, delete the batch migration of cutover.
• Administrator ends the post- migration tasks in Office 365 and optionally decommissions on-premises Exchange servers.
• At last, Administrator sends a letter of welcome to all the users to give the proper instruction about Office 365.

Setup Tasks After Migration

If the user is comfortable setting up the migration then, follow the given steps:

• By using Exchange admin center, set up the Exchange server.
• Change the MX recorder of an organization to Office 365 after completing the migration. The change in MX record permits users to send emails directly to new mailboxes in Office 365. To set up public DNS servers, users need to change MX record of an organization to Office 365 for routing all emails to Office 365 directly.

Conclusion

In this blog we have discussed cutover migration Office 365 prerequisites. As we have seen, these migration prerequisites are mandatory to be known/ followed before we start cutover migration of emails from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online. After following the points mentioned above, one can start with the migration process.