How to Migrate Mailbox from On-Premise to Office 365? Learn the Expert’s Way
Are you struggling while searching for the right answer to the query i.e. “how to migrate mailbox from On-Premise to Office 365?” Don’t worry anymore! You have come to the right place.
Here, we are going to discuss some of the best techniques to migrate on-premise exchange mailbox to office 365. So, whether your current on-premises server is Exchange or Lotus Notes, we have a solution for you.
In the past few years, many organizations switched over to Office 365 suite due to its popularity and the functionalities it delivers. And, now it’s becoming common.
However, there are a large number of organizations that are still struggling to make the transition due to a lack of technical experience with Office 365. But why care, when you have us? We will tell you the exact steps you need to follow to migrate mailbox(es) from the current on-premises environment to the new Office 365 account.
Why do Organizations Struggles While Moving Mailboxes From On-Premise to Office 365?
Migration legacy environment & data of multiple users without data loss requires a massive investment of resources and time. Before proceeding with data migration, users need to preplan their data, choose the right cloud platform, create users, purchase licenses, and assign roles and licenses to users.
The trouble doesn’t end here, the biggest problem is to migrate mailboxes from on-premises to Office 365 of every user in the old platform.
Although there are no shortcuts, tricks, or hacks to perform an initial task, there are some techniques that can assist you in easier data migration. This technique helps the Administrator to easily migrate mailboxes between both environments without affecting the day-to-day work of your employees.
Method to Migrate Mailbox From On-Premise to Office 365
There are many organizations that thinks that data migration to the cloud is a one-time thing. However, in reality, data migration should be a gradual process.
1. Export/Extract your On-Premise Mailbox.
First, Admin needs to copy the existing data of each user and collect them in a single computer/server which will act as a source machine.
2. Convert Every File into Destination Supported Format
The next biggest and costlier task is to convert each and every data file extracted from the source platform into a destination-supported file format. It means that if your destination cloud is Microsoft 365, data must be converted into PST format.
3. Importing Files into Destination User Account.
This task is quite a time-taking, where an Admin needs to import the files into Office 365 using their Admin Center.
Depending upon your source you can export its data to migrate the mailbox from On-premise to Office 365 platform.
Best Way to Migrate On-Premise Exchange Mailbox to Office 365
The previous section is a completely manual process, where an administrator needs to perform tasks one by one for each user. However, if you don’t want to go through the trouble of such a complicated task, then you can take the help of the SysTools Exchange to Office 365 Migration Tool.
This automated tool is quite easier to operate and offers multiple functionalities to ease the migration journey.
Benefits of Using Automated Tool Over Manual Solution
- Offers concurrent migration feature to migrate user accounts in batches.
- Use category and date-range filters to refine data before migration.
- Multiple options for mapping database files with respective user accounts
- Retry Failed and Re-Run Full option to handle migration upon power & internet connection loss
- Provides unlimited delta passes to migrate newly arrived data to Office 365 in the next attempt.
- Previews the live status of migration of each mailbox into respective cloud accounts.
- Generates summary and detailed migration report for checking migrated data.
Quick Steps to Migrate Mailbox from On-premise to Office 365:
1. Launch the migration utility and activate it for a demo or full version.
2. Select the Exchnage On-Premise as the Source & Destination as Office 365 platform.
3. Choose the category of items to migrate from On-premise to Office 365 & set date-filter.
4. In the source tab, select the folder location where the database is saved and validate.
5. In the destination tab, provide the details of the Office 365 platform and validate.
6. Select the option for source and destination user id mapping.
7. Validate the user accounts and Click on the Start Migration to migrate mailbox from on-premise to Office 365.
Why Do We Care?
A typical data migration contains a huge amount of data from multiple user accounts. Also, migrating mailboxes manually at once would guarantee failure as it requires performing multiple steps for each user database.
The administrator requires an automated tool to successfully migrate mailbox from on-premise to Office 365, especially when the number of users is more and the database is large.
Moreover, the automated tool doesn’t impact the day-to-day work of users, the admin can perform the data migration without letting users to log out of their systems.
