Basic email migration overview

If your small business is still using an email system that doesn’t have a custom domain name, you’re missing out on the opportunity to reinforce your brand and build trust. Worse, your competition could register a domain name you should have and divert potential business away from you.

I tell my clients that the first step in migrating email to Exchange Online — if they don’t have an existing mail server — is to register their domain name. Several domain registrars, including Microsoft, offer discounted rates for domain name registration.

If you already have a domain registered with a registrar, you should have the capability to add records to your domain name system (DNS). This feature is important when setting up your domain in Office 365 because you will be asked to manually add the records or have Office 365 add them automatically. To understand the pros and cons of both approaches, visit https://support.office.com/en-us/article/domains-faq-1272bad0-4bd4-4796-8005-67d6fb3afc5a#bkmk_howdoesoffice365managemydnsrecords.

For small businesses running their own mail servers or that have their emails hosted by a third-party provider, the general process for migrating email for all users at the same time is four-fold:

1. Create a Microsoft 365 tenant by buying or trying out Microsoft 365 Business licenses. This step automatically creates an Azure AD tenant where users will be hosted in the cloud.
2. Add users to Azure AD from Microsoft 365 Business Admin Center manually. For organizations with on-premises Exchange servers, users are synchronized from the on-premises directory to Azure AD by using a tool called Azure AD Connect.
3. Replicate email data from the current email system to Exchange Online in Office 365. During the replication, users can continue to send and receive email with the current email system.
4. Flip the switch (also called cutover) so emails start flowing through Exchange Online instead of through the old email system.

The ideal scenario for a small business is to use the new cloud-based system exclusively to reduce the IT infrastructure footprint. If you’re currently running Exchange servers on-premises, relying solely on Azure AD requires a change in the way you think about managing your identities and resources. There are tenured Exchange server systems engineers with decades of experience who will undoubtedly disagree with me and will insist that on-premises Exchange servers should not be retired, essentially shackling a business to the costly chain of managing on-premises infrastructure forever. This debate has come up often in my team of solution architects, and it’s interesting to see the arguments on both sides. At the end of the day, this book is about transforming and modernizing how you run a business, so I stay firm in my belief that, especially for small businesses, it’s time to shed the old ways and embrace a paradigm shift in how you manage your IT environment.

Capitalizing on the Office 365 Mail Migration Advisor

Outlining a step-by-step process for email migration is challenging because each email environment is different. In fact, the detailed activities for each of the four migration steps outlined in the preceding section can drastically vary from one organization to another.

There is, however, good news. The Setup Guidance card in Microsoft 365 Admin Center, shown in Figure 4-2, is your gateway to a successful email migration.

Click the See All Guides link on the card, and the Setup Guidance page appears. From there, click the Office 365 mail Migration Advisor (see Figure 4-3) to get started on your mailbox migration journey.

The Mail Migration Advisor is a wizard that takes you step-by-step through the email migration process. It’s built to accommodate different scenarios, so you know you’re not being given a cookie-cutter approach to migration. For example, when you get to the What’s Your Mail System? section, most common email scenarios are already accounted for, as shown in Figure 4-4.

You don’t have to complete all the steps in one sitting. You can save your work and go back to it later. After you’ve added a mail system, however, the left pane will display the rest of the steps to complete the migration, so you can track your progress, as shown in Figure 4-5.

Do-it-yourself with the SharePoint Migration Tool

The SharePoint Migration Tool is a handy application taking the guesswork out of moving files to Office 365 from either your hard drive, third-party SaaS storage provider, or on-premises SharePoint environment. You basically just need to download the tool and, with a few clicks, the tool will do its magic while you, depending on the size of data you are moving, grab a cup of coffee or turn on Netflix to watch your favorite show while you wait for the tool to finish its job.

Here’s how it works.

1. Download the tool at http://aka.ms/spmt.

2. Double-click the downloaded file to run the tool and then click the Sign In button, shown in Figure 4-6.

   The Where Is Your Data? screen appears.

3. Select the source of your data (for this exercise, choose the File Share option):
   • If you’re moving files from an on-premises SharePoint environment, choose SharePoint on-premises.
   • If you want to move files from your hard drive or file shares, choose File Share. If you want to move files from Dropbox, make sure the Dropbox app is running on your desktop and select the File Share option.
   • If you have multiple sources of data, choose JSON or CSV File for bulk migration. Note that you’ll need some programming skills to create a JSON file.
4. In the Select a Source and Destination screen, click the Choose Folder button.

5. In the Browse for Folder window, choose the folder you want to migrate and then click OK.

   The Select a Source and Destination screen reappears.

6. Click the Next button.

   A new box appears in the same screen so you can paste the URL for SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Document.

7. In the Enter a URL box, enter or paste the URL of the destination library. In the Choose a Document Library drop-down menu, choose the appropriate document library. Then click the Add button.

8. On the next screen, review the entries for the Source and Destination, and then click the Migrate button to start the migration process.

   The tool displays the migration status. If you need to change the Source or Destination entry, you must restart the process.

9. When the migration is complete, click the Close button.

The tool captures logs from the migration job, which you can view after the migration. Seeing the logs can be helpful for troubleshooting.

If you must close or accidentally close the tool before the migration job is complete, you can resume the job from any computer, provided that the job has run for at least 5 minutes.

Another cool feature of the tool is its capability to perform future incremental migrations. If someone in your team didn’t get the memo and continues to save files to your file share, you can run the tool again and move just the new or updated files from the source location. To take advantage of this feature, click Yes when the tool asks if you want to keep the migration settings for future incremental runs after the migration is finished.

Syncing files with the OneDrive client

Another way to migrate files to SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business is through the OneDrive sync client. After the sync client is running, you can simply drag files from the source location to the appropriate library in either OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.

If Windows 10 has been deployed with the Microsoft 365 Business license, the OneDrive for Business sync client is automatically set up for the account using the device. As such, OneDrive for Business folders will be available in File Explorer.

If you’re migrating files to a SharePoint Online document library by using the OneDrive sync client, you first need to sync the SharePoint document library to your desktop. You do this by navigating to the SharePoint Online document library, and then clicking the Sync icon on the command bar, as shown in Figure 4-7. The sync client will prompt you through the rest of the steps, which are straightforward.