Seeking recommendations for Vendor / Providers to support a migration to Office 365 from a local server based Exchange. Church location is Central California Coast. User base is Church Staff of 20 users.
Thanks in advance,
Gary
Hi Gary,
Ed Buford (Method Computing) helped us migrate about 160 mailboxes last year. He helped us get the initial framework in place, gave us some training on how to migrated mailboxes on our own, and then helped us decommission on the on-premise Exchange servers afterward. Overall, it was a smooth transition for our IT team as well as the rest of our staff.
HI Justin,
Thank you for the suggestion.
How did you handle your Servers AD, did you migrate the AD function to Azure?
And Print Server function (Printer used for Sunday Bulletin production)?
Thanks,
Gary
We kept all of that in-house. At this point, we’ve only moved email to Office 365 and are experimenting with Skype4B/Teams with a few individuals.
Networking Technologies, Erie Pennsylvania
I’ve worked with them for 20 years.
We were NOT using exchange locally so migrating all 300 pop3 mailboxes was fun but everything went off without a hitch. We migrated in August of 2015.
As far as I know, AAD isn’t ready for a full takeover unless you plan to run your entire network on Azure, and even then, I don’t think it’s really ready.
We’ve used SkyKick to migrate well over 1000 mailboxes to Office 365 in 2017. If you’re looking for something to make it incredibly easy, this is a great option.
When we moved our church’s from a POP3 to O365, we had about 8 full time staff, and I just manually imported the mail from Thunderbird. I’ve done a few smaller migrations with the tools provided in Office 365 for an Exchange to Office 365 migration, and they worked very well and were free.
If you do decide to do AAD sync and you’re running Exchange locally, be aware that there’s actually some configuration of your on-prem AD env. required.
CCB Technology did our migration back in 2014 and then Mirazon did some follow-up work. Both are qualified although I felt that Mirazon was stronger in their knowledge and experience (admittedly, 2014 was a long time ago in O365 years so who know what’s changed). We did a cutover migration and are using Azure ADConnect to sync between on-prem AD and O365.
We still have an on-prem Exchange server but only because of a long sad story of woe involving an original SBS server and multiple GUIDs and on and on that have prevented us from properly decommissioning it.
I’ve done a few migrations, I’ve used BitTitan (that may be MSP only) and Skykick, both work great to do migrations for both O365 and G-Suite. As for directory services, you can move to Azure AD but you really need to get Intune too if you need to manage endpoints. For that I’d get either the Enterprise Mobility product or Microsoft 365. Realistically, you may want to continue with your on-prem AD and let the connector sync users until you can really do a feasibility of whether or not Azure AD would be right for your environment (definitely can’t handle authenticating print users). Pretty much every MSP out there will do a migration, it’s one of their bread and butter things they do so you can probably call one in to help and they’ll roll it over for you for a pretty reasonable rate.
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