Office 365 Migration Errors and Troubleshooting
There are three methods to migrate to Office 365 from Exchange Server — Cutover Migration, Staged Migration and Hybrid Migration. We will not go through all the processes involved in these methods. However, we will discuss some common issues and errors you may face during Office 365 migration, and how to troubleshoot them. Sometimes, good planning prior to the migration will save you from a lot of issues.
Having a clear migration plan is essential for a smooth migration. Like any other IT project, it is important not to lose any data or disruption in your business while migrating to Microsoft Office 365 or Microsoft 365. Sometimes, even scheduled employee communication would bring all the users in line with the project, and making a project plan to have all your business on the same goal.
Choosing the right package is of financial and operational importance. Office 365 comes in different package options such as Office 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Enterprise E1-E5, with regards to Exchange. If you want to package Windows 10 Enterprise license and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS), you would look at the Microsoft 365 packages. However, choosing the biggest package does not mean you are choosing the right one as you might be paying a lot for features you even do not need. With Office 365, you have the option to choose different features as per your needs.
Connectivity to the internet must be steady and fast, irrespective of the migration method you’re using — be it Staged, Cutover or Hybrid. When you migrate a large amount of data, you need an uninterrupted connection between the source and the destination to ensure swift migration with no interruption. Apart from having a good internet connection, it’s imperative to have some dedicated bandwidth for the migration. Although you might have a fast internet connection, if it’s congested with other traffic, it will not bring good outcome during the migration process.
Taking stock of all data to move is important. You would have an inventory of all the mailboxes and data you currently have. Prior to the migration, you would have everything listed, which needs to be migrated. Otherwise, after you decommission the Exchange Server, it would be a hassle to export any data from EDB files. Once you decommission an Exchange Server, it cleans up the Active Directory. By restoring just the EDB file, it will not be possible to export any data as the EDB file is only accessible from an Exchange Server and must be mounted and online, and opened from the same Exchange Server on which it is created.
Migration complexity should be looked into before choosing a setup. Hybrid setup is ideal for Office 365, where the migration can be smooth for the users. Unfortunately, it will not be such a smooth migration setup for administrators as it requires additional configurations to be set up in order to have a healthy hybrid setup. Things can go wrong, and you do not want to end up with loss of data here. It does not mean that a migration would require a lot of extra configurations but choosing the right migration plan is crucial so you don’t end up with huge administrative efforts to set it up. Of course, hybrid migration is suggested if you are a big organization. The staged and cutover migration is ideal for small to medium businesses.
Training is an important aspect of Office 365. With Office 365 comes a lot of new features for collaboration and remote working such as Stream, Forms, Teams, OneNote, Planner and Flow. Apart from the users being trained on how to use them, it’s important to have the administrators trained on how to manage and secure the Office 365 tenant.
Conclusion
As said, there are various ways to migrate to the Office 365 platform. During migration, things can go wrong. Therefore, it is imperative that you have a failback strategy. In some cases, you may end up with an unusable Exchange Server due to misconfiguration of your hybrid/staged, or with a corrupted database, or you might have missed to export a mailbox or resource, past the migration and decommissioning of your Exchange Server. As EDB file being a property of Microsoft, you cannot just export from it. Thus, you will end up with data loss and unrecoverable data. In such cases, Stellar Converter for EDB is your ideal partner application as it can open any EDB file directly — be it corrupted, healthy or created in any version of Exchange Server. You can export the EDB data to PST and other formats. You can also import the mailboxes to a live Exchange Mailbox Database, or use it as an Office 365 migration tool.
