Once you’ve fully grasped the details of your domain name set up, you will need to spend some time on key areas to understand and go through every item to ensure that your transition will run smoothly.
E-mail access
The first thing you should take note of is e-mail access. Ask yourself the following questions:
- How are your users accessing their mail?
- Is it via web browser or application?
- if it’s the latter, you have to know which applications they are using.
- Where is the email saved to: is it on an e-mail server, or is it being stored on the cloud?
- Is it on premise or with another service provider?
For example, if you’re using the Microsoft Outlook as your email application you may be using a server platform (Exchange) . A copy of your mail is stored in your machine, and the other is saved on the Microsoft Exchange Server. You can also access your Outlook account via web browser through the Outlook Web Access.
Knowing how your users are currently accessing their e-mails and its exact location will help you determine how long your actual go live process will take. It will also help you identify the best time to do the migration.
Some e-mail locations are trickier and may take some time to migrate, so doing the migration on weekends would be the reasonable action. If your set up is not as complicated, then it can be easily done during the day by running some background tools.
E-mail environment
Aside from the general access points, you need to identify the exact number of mailboxes you have, as well as the size and the number of items in each mailbox. Note that Office 365 have mailbox size limits depending on your subscription plan, so it would be better for you to make the necessary adjustments now to avoid errors during the migration process. Documenting how many email addresses you have will also help in preventing you from having missing e-mail addresses once you go live.
It is also important to make sure that you have access to the backend system that you currently manage your e-mail with. This is especially important to ensure that you will not have black spots in the migration that could very well lead to missing e-mail addresses and delays in getting to the go live component. Once you’ve identified and documented all these, you can now proceed to prepping your Office 365 environment and setting up your new accounts.
Pre-migration preparedness is vital to get the best user experience for Office 365. While you can simply go ahead with mindless transition, this could open your business up to risks and loss of data. Make sure that before even touching your system, you have identified, mapped out, and documented all of your key items and components.
If you have any concerns or inquiries about Office 365 and email migration, we would be happy to assist. Don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected].
