Office 365 has its own antivirus and anti-spam solutions to keep your email safe, but your users may be used to their old solution. If you already have an antivirus/anti-spam email gateway in place, consider whether you want to continue using it with Office 365. Is there currently an antivirus or anti-spam gateway with blacklists, whitelists, etc., and do you want to keep it? Questions That Are A Little Outside of The Mail Migration Permissions for sharing your calendar with others may not transfer to Office 365 automatically, so if you have several calendar sharing schemes setup, you will need to carefully map them before starting your migration and ensure that you have a backup, just in case. If calendar sharing is a feature that is heavily used in your organization, you will need to plan for this as well. It’s a good idea to account for these in your migration plan, whether you decide you need them migrated over or not. If needed, these can be migrated over, but it will require extra work, especially for the autocomplete. You need to determine whether this will be a problem for you, or if you can simply just recreate them. When you reconnect to your new mailbox, these functions that you have set up in the past could disappear. Will losing your autocomplete file, signatures, or reattaching PST (personal storage) files be a problem? Generally, a sync is performed between your on-premise and Office 365 when migrating, so you won’t have to worry about multiple passwords.
Also, by default you will be asked to change your password every 90 days. Luckily, complex passwords are required in Office 365. Your new password will have to be at least 8 characters, including each of the following categories: upper case, lower case, numbers, and symbols. This is extremely insecure, and while you may have been able to get away with this on your on-premise email, when you switch to Office 365, where your email is accessible over the internet from anywhere, there will be a larger chance for someone to hack your password. If you don’t have a password policy in place, you may be using something like PASSWORD123 to login. Is password compliance going to be an issue? Perform an inventory of the services and devices that are linked to your current e-mail server and be sure to point them to the new cloud server. This is something that you need to be aware of, and have a plan of action for before starting down the migration path, or you could suffer from more headaches. If you migrate your server without thinking about the devices (such as scanners) and applications that link to it, post-migration woes are in your future, as network scanning tools start to return failure notifications and printers and scanners start e-mailing your scanned document to nowhere. It’s like when you move to a new physical home address, you have to notify the mail client (USPS) of your new address in order to receive your mail at that location.ĭo you have devices or applications relaying email through your current email solution? Otherwise, every other server in the world would still be sending to your old server, which would be decommissioned. When you make the switch to Office 365, you will need to access your DNS in order to prove you own your domain and to direct email to your new mailboxes. If everything is well planned and goes as expected, this is probably less than an hour of work, but when you do not have access to your DNS records the process can come to a screeching halt. This is one of the simplest parts of a mail migration, but can also cause the biggest delays. Questions You May Not Have Consideredĭo you have access to change your Domain Name System (DNS) records? Any other version below 2007 will simply not connect to Office 365 for data migration. If you have Office 2007, migration technically still works, but you will run into calendar issues, or other important data that is unable to transfer over, resulting in its loss. This is important, mainly because older versions of Microsoft Office might need to be upgraded before your migration can even begin, which can potentially become a huge expense and time sink. Most Office users already use Outlook, but this can have a huge impact on what your options are for migrating. The best place to start with your migration is to determine what your current email solution is. Below are nine questions to think about before your email migration begins: Pre-requisite Questions Low upfront costs, simpler licensing for multiple computers and products, and hosted Exchange are compelling reasons to take advantage of this cloud computing option.īut it’s not always as easy as creating an account and following a step-by-step migration wizard migrating can be tricky. Office 365 offers three great incentives for small/medium business IT departments.