Migrating from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

Azure · 03-15-2012, 10:15 PM

Anyone have any experience with this? We're in the process of changing our nameservers. 1and1 takes forever.

They advertise $5/month/user for strictly email/calender/contacts/tasks, but for some reason our plan comes out at $7/month/user. Not sure what is going on.

Either way it was a tossup between this and Google Apps. I like the idea of using Microsoft products, as everything at work is Microsoft.

Rathji · 03-15-2012, 10:22 PM

May god have mercy on your soul.

Actually I am kidding, since industry regulations prevent us from doing the same thing, I have not looked into it much. Is a migration from 2003 supported? If so, then assuming all other costs are equal, you are probably right about choosing it over Google Docs.

Azure · 03-15-2012, 10:30 PM

Actually, your first statement is more or less 100% correct. You have no idea the hell we've gone through the last week trying to fix ongoing issues with the existing Exhange server.

From what I understand, its as simple as exporting the .PST file for each user, and importing it back into Outlook under the 'office 365' account, where it then syncs to the cloud server.

It 'should' work, but absolutely nothing has worked like it should up till now.

And screw 1and1. Once this is over all our domains and hosting stuff is going somewhere else. Still haven't decided where.

sclitheroe · 03-15-2012, 10:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Azure

It 'should' work, but absolutely nothing has worked like it should up till now.

Because of your legacy environment, or the hosted Exchange side? I would expect MS' hosted Exchange to be pretty rock solid - from what I've experienced with competing products (eg. Rackspace), hosted Exchange is pretty solid in the hands of a competent provider.

TorqueDog · 03-16-2012, 12:08 AM

I work almost exclusively with the Exchange Server family (the other side of my expertise is Lync Server/OCS and Enterprise Voice), so this thread had my name all over it. Microsoft's Office 365 solution is quite nice and very stable, however for a hands-on person like myself, I always prefer an on-premises solution.

Alas, I have never had to migrate a client from a legacy Exchange 2003 environment to the hosted platform.

^Scott, it sounds more like there are issues with the legacy environment more than the hosted Exchange.

Rathji · 03-16-2012, 06:37 AM

Every migration I have ever done has involved far more time bringing the existing system up to meet Best Practices than every other part of the process combined, so I would not surprised to hear that was true in this case. Although, if the process really is as simple as importing mailboxes, I am really interested to know where the difficulty is coming from.

Its pretty good motivation to make sure stuff like that is kept up as you build and maintain a server though, knowing that in a few years you will likely be doing the same thing again.

Azure · 03-16-2012, 10:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Because of your legacy environment, or the hosted Exchange side? I would expect MS' hosted Exchange to be pretty rock solid - from what I've experienced with competing products (eg. Rackspace), hosted Exchange is pretty solid in the hands of a competent provider.

Because of what we had in place up till now, and the way the network was setup.

We have spent a week without email due to various issues with the Exchange server. Finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

Microsoft support setup a way for us to get it working like we want until we figure everything else out. Turns out that it'll cost us $4.79 Canadian per month, per user for hosted Exchange. Not sure if the Office part is included.

Pretty damn good price. Should have it up and running later today.

Azure · 03-16-2012, 10:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rathji

Every migration I have ever done has involved far more time bringing the existing system up to meet Best Practices than every other part of the process combined, so I would not surprised to hear that was true in this case. Although, if the process really is as simple as importing mailboxes, I am really interested to know where the difficulty is coming from.

Its pretty good motivation to make sure stuff like that is kept up as you build and maintain a server though, knowing that in a few years you will likely be doing the same thing again.

We had a spam problem about a week ago, and after that everything basically quit working. We've done everything we possibly could think of but there are still issues.

Actually migrating from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 by exporting and importing the PST files is the simple part. Getting to that point isn't.

Azure · 03-21-2012, 09:07 PM

More or less done. Took 5 days to get our DNS nameservers changed on 1and1 before we could make it work.

Just finishing up syncing up our calenders to Office365. Pretty much finished but there is data on there back to 2010, so it takes some time. As of right now everything is working great. Easy to setup on all our phones, and a breeze to setup on Outlook.

Actually migrating from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 was easy. We just exporting all the .PST files for each user, and then imported them back into the Office 365 account. Took a couple hours to sync up completely, but we're more or less done. Even the users with 5GB PST files, it worked like a breeze. Obviously it just takes more time to actually sync everything.

The only problem I'm having right now is syncing up shared calenders on my phone. Haven't played around with it much though. We run 3 shared calenders for scheduling projects and stuff like that, and they are not classified under 'my calender' in my Outlook. I'll have to look that up tomorrow.

Otherwise it is great. Microsoft hit a home run here from the looks of it.

Azure · 03-22-2012, 01:23 PM

Pretty much done. Couple of our office guys are in Europe on a technology tour, so we just have to update their inbox. It is literally a breeze.

Setting up everything is amazingly easy, and Microsoft is very supportive and has called us a couple times to explain stuff that we were wondering about. I think we're going to pay about $4.69/user for Exchange Online, Lync and a limited version of BES, which we don't really need, but its nice anyways for the few Blackberries we have left.

I highly recommend this service for anyone that is using Exchange. Even if you have in-house staff that could look after a local server, its not worth it considering how cheap Office 365 is.