Detailed Office 365 Migration Checklist to Ensure a Smooth Migration

In this article, we have discussed all the important points that a user should keep in mind while performing the shift. There are essential points provided in this Office 365 migration checklist, and you should follow each step from preparing for the process to post-migration carefully, 

Reasons Why Users Would Want to Migrate

There are many different reasons why businesses would want to migrate Office 365. Some of these reasons are: 

1. Mergers/Acquisitions — When two or more than two organisations merge or are acquired by a larger business, they need to migrate Office 365 to have their data in one place. This would help users access files and documents easily. 
2. Business Rebranding — When an organisation rebrands itself, it needs to change its domain. It would be necessary for this business to migrate its data to the Office 365 with a different domain name. 
3. Consolidating — If a company has many different Office 365 tenants, it would be difficult to manage all of them. Users can perform the migration process to make the data and documents all in one place. This would help the organisation in cutting costs and make it easier to manage these services. 
4. Governance and Compliance —- Several organisations would have to migrate their information if new governance and compliance regulations are introduced. 
5. Scaling of the Business — As businesses grow, they need more resources to perform their daily tasks. These businesses need to upgrade their plans to meet the needs of the users and the organisation. 
6. Cost Saving —- Some organisations would want to move their data in order to reduce costs that are associated with the management of several services such as support, licensing, and much more. 

Office 365 Migration Checklist

Users should have a well-thought-out, and well-planned strategy that spans three stages: Preparing for the migration, The migration process, and Post migration. Employees should coordinate across all departments to improve the adoption by the users in a secure framework. Follow the detailed Office 365 migration checklist to have a smooth migration experience. 

	Phase of Migration	Steps that Users Should Follow	Details of the Steps
1.	Pre-Migration Phase	Taking inventory of the data and other important documents.	You can start by making a list of all the systems in the organisation. Make note of the environments, apps being used on a daily basis, and network devices. This will help you determine the complexity of the migration.
		Analyzing the content.	You should perform an analysis of all the content in the organisation that can help you choose the right migration approach you should take. Using this, determine the content that is important to migrate and which content should be cleaned or archived.
		Communicate with other departments.	Clearly communicate with departments such as IT, security, end-users, and compliance. You can get input from these departments about their requirements regarding the migration.
		Take note of the network capacity.	Assess the capacity of the network and ensure that it can withhold the load of the migration. Upgrade the network if needed for the post-migration requirements.
		Choose an identity model.	There are several identity models that you can choose from such as on-premise, hybrid, or cloud. You can make the choice based on current business requirements and also consider the requirements of the IT and security departments. Resolving questions of other users regarding managing, authentication, and synchronising of accounts.
2.	Migration Phase	Setting up the Office 365 tenant.	You first need to set up a tenant for licensing, and configuring the settings, permissions, and domains.
		Determine the migration tool that you would like to use.	Select the tool based on your and the organisation’s needs. You can also assess the compatibility of this tool with the ecosystem of IT in the organisation.
		Creating the migration schedule.	Come up with a schedule for the migration process that prioritises IT, security, and the speedy transfer of the documents and data.
		Conducting testing before the migration process.	You can ask other users to install the Office apps and test them. This can help you address and also fix all the issues before the actual migration.
		Migrate all the data and files.	After preparing everything, you can perform the migration process and transfer all your data to the new environment.
3.	Post-Migration Phase	Resolving issues and support establishment.	Setting up a channel of support for issues related to Office 365 can be beneficial. You can conduct reviews regularly to identify and solve recurring problems.
		Offer training for the employees.	You can develop a training program so that users can learn the features of the Office 365. This can include videos, documents, other training sessions.
		Decommissioning the legacy systems.	You can verify that all the important data has been migrated first, after wich the legacy apps and services can be uninstalled or disabled.

Explaining the Migration Checklist for Exchnage Server

Exchange migration can be tiresome and complex. The reason for this is the difficulty of the process of migration that either requires experts or their supervision for the migration. With some methods, a user can make the Exchange migration much easier. This section will help you by providing a checklist that can be followed to make the migration process much simpler. 

There are three main phases of the Exchange Server Migration Checklist. These are as follows: 

1. Planning the move — This phase includes critical information that is required to deploy the migration successfully. It includes steps such as setup, deployment, mailbox, exchange management-shell, Client connectivity to name a few. 
2. Deployment phase —- This phase helps users to establish co-existence of services with others without disrupting the present services.
3. Migration Phase —- This is to migrate services such as mail flow, public folder, clients, and mailxes, and much more. 

Microsoft Exchange Server 2016/2013/2010/2007 Migration Checklist

After discussing the Office 365 migration checklist, here are some of the major Exchange server checklists for migration of data and other important documents successfully: 

1. Knowledge about release notes — This section consists of all the critical information that is required to successfully deploy the procedures. It contains segments such as setup, deployment, mailbox, mail flow, exchange management shell, and the coesitence between which the migration process is happening. 
2. Know about the requirements of the system —- You should be aware of the MS Exchange 2013/2010 for the Exchange’s recovery of data. This needs to be fetched before the initiation of the installation process. It includes hardware information, software information, details of the operating system, and the needs of the network. 
3. Ensuring that the prerequisite steps have been completed — This would help the user to install all the prerequisites for MS Exchange mailbox. It is to install prerequisites windows server 2008 R2, windows server 2012 R2, SP1, and windows server 2008. You should consider the compatibility of the Exhange Server 2019 with the domain level and active directory forest. If the infrastructure is available that is running windows server 2008 R2 or Windows server 2012, you need to consider upgrading as these operating systems are now unsupported. If the forest level is not set up at windows server 2012 R2 or higher, then you cannot have the Exchnage server 2019
4. Ensuring the Namespace Configuration disjoining —- The checklist will help users with the process of configuring domain name system using the group policy management console. A DNS suffix list of searches is important to add more than on DNS suffix. 
5. Select the offline address book for MS Exchange version 2007 —- This will help the user by briefing them about the Exchange’s management shell to provision offline address book or OAB recipients. There are 3 ways that you can use to identify the recipients who are using which OAB. 
6. Generating Legacy MS Exhange’s hostname — It will help the users to create a legacy domain name system host names. It is needed to ensure that legacy MS Exchange 2007 and MS Exchnage 2010 and 2013 coexist. 
7. Installation of the MS Exchange 2013/2010 — This will help the user about verifying installation and actually installing MS Exchange 2013/2010. To do this, we recommend that users should run the Get- Exchange Server smdlet and then go to review the setup-log file. 
8. Preparing the MS Exchange 2010/13 mailbox —- mailboxes are considered to be the most common recipients for information workers. These mailboxes have active directory account that are associated with them. They are used to send and receive messages, tasks, appointments, notes, documents, and more. 
9. Ensure the configuration of the MS Exchange —- This would help users get briefed about the configuration of the virtual directories that are related to MS Exchange. MS Exhange 2013 Client does not process client’s protocol, but still some settings are required for application to the client access server. 
10. Configuring the DNS records — After the configuration of the server is done, the next step is DNS record changing, which helps in directing the connection to the MS Exchange 2013 Server. 
11. Exchange edition and licensing — Users can remain with Exchnage 2019 standard version if they are planning on using the standalone version, of not more than 5 mailbox databases. It does not mean that you cannot mount more than 5 mailbox databases. If you want to split databases nd have more than 5, then you would need the enterprise version. 
12. Installing Exchange server 2019 — You need to have windows server 2019 without which installation of Exchnage server 2019 cannot be installed. You would have to consider purchasing of windows server 2019 standard. 
13. Co-existence of the Exchange Server — This would only be useful when you upgrade from an older version to the new Exchange Server 2019. Note that only Exchnage 2013/16 can co-exist with the Exchange Server 2019. If you have the 2010 Exchange server, you will not be able to install the Exchange Server 2019. 
14. Tasks to be done after the installation — Users can brief about client-access configuration and mail flow through the subscribed edge transport server, installation of MS Exchnage management tools 2013. This helps users to know about the MS Exchange 2013 after installation of the server. 

Migration Methods That are Frequently Used

Before we discuss about the Office 365 Migration Checklist, we will discuss the methods of migration most commonly used. There are several methods to migrate your data and other important information safely and in time. In the table given below, we have discussed the different types of migration that are frequently used to successfully migrate data. 

Method of migration	Description
Internet Message Acess Protocol Migration (IMAP)	Users can use the Exchange Online PowerShell or the Exchange Admin Center to migrate users’ mailboxes from an IMAP messaging system. This method includes migrating mailboxes from several other email hosting services such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and much more.
Staged Migration	You can use the staged migration if you want to migrate all of your business’s mailboxes to Office 365 over time. Using this migration type, users can migrate batches of mailboxes that are on-premise to Office 365 over the course of some time (Eg- weeks or months)
Cutover Migration	Users can use cutover migration to migrate all of the mailboxes that are on-premise to Office 365. Use the cutover migration type if you want to move all your emails to Office 365.  Using this migration, you can migrate a maximum of 2,000 mailboxes. Performance can be affected if the number of emails is very high. So, the recommended number of mailboxes that you should migrate is 150.  The contacts and other distribution groups in the Exchange organisation is also migrated.
Hybrid Deployment Migration method	The hybrid deployment offers the ability to provide a feature-rich experience. It also has admin control that is on their existing Exchange organisation to the cloud. This process provides a very simple and straightforward experience of an Exchange organisation between Exchange that is on-premise and Exchange online. This method can also serve as an immediate step to migrate Office 365.
Automated third-party tools	There are several tools available in the market that can easily perform the migration process for you. This makes the migration less time-consuming and does not hamper the productivity of the users.

Make Migration Easier Using an Automated Migration Tool

So how do you make sure that you have a successful migration process? You can migrate your data and other important documents with the help of an automated tool that is one of the best in the industry. This automated tool is called SysTools Office 365 to Office 365 Migration Software. 

This tool maintains the data structure completely and also its integrity throughout the entire process. This tool is the top solution to everything you need to migrate such as Office 365 tenant to tenant migration, and much more. 

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This tool even allows users to export data in bulk without any loss of your important files. The Delta migration features allows users to move the newly arrived data from the source. 

Conclusion

An Office 365 migration checklist helps users make sure that they are not missing out anything. When you want to perform a migration, you should make sure that you have a pre and post-migration checklist. This would help you perform migration smoothly and without losing any of your important data. Alternatively, since the manual method of migrating is quite complex, using an automated tool will help you by automatically performing the migration process for you so you wouldn’t have to do anything.