Exchange 2010 to office 365 migration

As of October 13, 2020, Microsoft no longer supports Exchange 2010, leaving users vulnerable to potential security risks. Migrating to Office 365 is essential for maintaining security and accessing ongoing support. Office 365 not only provides robust email services through Exchange Online but also includes a suite of collaboration tools such as SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, making it an ideal solution for businesses seeking enhanced functionality and security.

For a smooth Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration, EdbMails Exchange migration software is an excellent choice. It simplifies the migration process by allowing users to migrate their mailboxes directly from Exchange 2010 to Office 365 without complex setups or intermediate steps. With its user-friendly interface, EdbMails guides you through the entire process while ensuring data integrity throughout the migration. The software also supports incremental migration, which migrates only the new or modified source items to the target server during subsequent migrations, thereby avoiding duplicate items on the target server, optimizing bandwidth, and reducing overall migration time.

EdbMails is engineered for high performance, ensuring fast migration speeds while effectively managing large volumes of data. It also provides options for selective migration of mailboxes, folders, or specific items, allowing for a customized approach to meet your needs. With detailed migration reports to monitor progress, EdbMails offers transparency throughout the migration process. This guide will explore the top reasons to migrate from Exchange 2010 to Office 365, a comprehensive migration checklist, prerequisites for migration, the migration process, post-migration activities, and how EdbMails can facilitate a successful Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration operation.

Top reasons to migrate Exchange 2010 to Office 365:

• Migrating to Office 365 can lead to significant cost savings by eliminating the need for on-premises hardware maintenance, upgrades, and associated operational costs, while offering predictable subscription-based pricing. EdbMails facilitates a cost-effective Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration by streamlining the migration process, reducing the need for additional IT resources, and ensuring zero disruption to daily operations.
• Office 365 enables users to access emails, calendars, and documents from anywhere, on any device with an internet connection, enhancing flexibility, remote work capabilities, and collaboration among employees. EdbMails plays a crucial role in this by ensuring a smooth migration of mailbox data, allowing users to quickly adapt to the new environment without losing access to important information.
• Office 365 provides strong security features, including threat protection, encryption, and multi-factor authentication, safeguarding against cyber threats and protecting sensitive data more effectively than on-premises solutions. EdbMails enhances this security by ensuring that all mailbox data is migrated securely, with encryption in transit, thus preserving the integrity of sensitive information during the transition.
• With Office 365, organizations benefit from automatic updates and maintenance, ensuring their email systems remain up-to-date with the latest features, security patches, and compliance requirements without the need for manual intervention. EdbMails supports this by providing a reliable migration process that preserves all data settings, allowing organizations to fully leverage Office 365's automatic enhancements from day one.
• EdbMails enhances the flexibility of Office 365, providing a scalable solution for organizational growth. This allows businesses to effortlessly add users and expand services without incurring additional hardware costs, ensuring both efficiency and adaptability. EdbMails makes scaling easy by allowing the seamless migration of multiple mailboxes, accommodating growth without impacting system performance.

Best software to migrate Exchange 2010 to Microsoft 365:

EdbMails Exchange Migration Software stands out as the best solution for migrating mailbox data from Exchange 2010 to Microsoft 365 due to its specialized features tailored for this transition. This software ensures zero data loss by allowing users to migrate all mailbox components, including emails, calendars, contacts, tasks, and public folders, while preserving the original folder structure and metadata. One of its key strengths is the incremental migration capability, which enables users to migrate only newly added or modified data during the subsequent migrations. EdbMails also offers robust security measures. Its intuitive user interface simplifies the migration process, making it accessible for both IT professionals and non-technical users, eliminating the need for extensive training. Furthermore, EdbMails automatically generates comprehensive migration reports, allowing users to monitor the migration status in real-time and troubleshoot any issues promptly. With its combination of efficiency, security, and user-friendliness, EdbMails is the optimal choice for organizations looking to migrate from Exchange 2010 to Microsoft 365 seamlessly.

1. Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration checklists

   During the Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration, it is essential to consider the best strategy to be adopted depending on the position of the organization and its needs. Here is a general checklist of items to look for and plan that will help you in identifying your environments:

   1. Decide the number of mailboxes that you wish to migrate.
   2. Identify the type of migration environment you currently have (Hybrid or non-Hybrid).
   3. Create a list of items in the source environment, including the operating system, hardware, user count, Active Directory association, network configuration, firewall setup, and installed programs.
   4. Decide whether you prefer to migrate everything at once or in stages.
   5. Determine if you and or your clients want to move mailboxes from on-premises servers to Office 365.
   6. Check your internet connection speed, and ensure that all your network settings and configurations are correct.
   7. Based on the above analysis decide whether to convert public folders to shared mailboxes to target platform.
   8. Identify a proper Office 365 license and set up mailboxes in the desired target environment.
   9. To know the exact approach to take towards the migration, it is recommended to carry out a pilot migration of a limited number of mailboxes to determine the readiness for a large-scale migration.
   10. Carry out the actual migration processes and check if all the data had been migrated as intended.
   11. Make all necessary DNS entries on the intended platform and remove the Exchange 2010 server when all the configurations in the new environment are fine.

2. Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration prerequisites

   • Step 1: Consider the migration approach

     There are various factors that you should follow before migrating to Office 365 so as to have a smooth migration. Depending on your source and target environment, the following migration paths are available to aid your decision making.

     Current environment and migration requirement	Ideal migration approach	How does the migration take place?
     Complete Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration in a single event and in a limited time frame.	Cutover migration for Exchange	Set up your target Office 365 tenant and migrate everything to the cloud in a single sitting.
     Perform the migration in phases or migrate mailboxes over weekends	Staged migration to Office 365	Migrate your mailboxes and mail data in stages and transfer the required or the most recent data first, followed by the others.
     Migrate from Exchange 2010 to MIcrosoft 365 Hybrid environment	Hybrid Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration	Migrate from the source to the target server in a Hybrid environment

      Use the Microsoft 365 mail migration advisor to determine which migration method is best suited to your environment.

   • Step 2: Check the bandwidth and network requirements

     Ensure that you meet the network and bandwidth requirements for the migration. See network and migration planning, performance factors and best practices for Microsoft 365 migration.

   • Step 3: Determine the Microsoft 365 license plan suited to your needs

     Office 365 has business and enterprise plans, each suited to different user requirements. Compare Office 365 business plans and compare Office 365 enterprise plans from these links. You can purchase an Office 365 licensing plan specific to your needs or sign up for a 30 day free trial and decide to go with a suitable one later.

   • Step 4: Set up your target Office 365 tenant for the migration

     Plan for your tenant implementation and deploy your tenant. See tenant roadmap for Microsoft 365. If you plan to install Office apps on your computer, see system requirements for Microsoft 365 and Office configuration support matrix. Because Office 365 is a cloud based solution, it is important to learn where your Microsoft 365 customer data is stored.

   • Step 5: Add and verify the custom domain on Office 365

     If you have a custom email domain from your hosting provider to which you want to migrate and receive emails, you must verify and add the domain on Office 365. Next, you must add DNS records to correctly receive emails to your new domain.

   • Step 6: Create mailboxes and mail-enabled Public folders

     Before you migrate to Office 365, ensure that you create mailboxes for your users in your organization and assign suitable licenses to them.

     1. Add users and assign licenses to Office 365 users
     2. Add several users at the same time to Office 365
     3. Assign Microsoft 365 licenses to user accounts
     4. If you are planning for the Public folder migration, ensure that you create the Public folder and assign root permissions to global admin user
     5. If you are planning to migrate to Archive mailboxes Enable In-Place Archive mailboxes in Office 365
   • Step 7: Set the impersonation role on the source to the admin user

     Ensure that you set the following permissions to the admin account on the source Exchange 2010 server and that the mailboxes you migrate are not hidden from the address lists.

     1. On the source server:
        1. ApplicationImpersonation
        2. View-Only Configuration - Run the cmdlet New-ManagementRoleAssignment using the Exchange Management Shell to assign the View-Only Configuration role to the admin.

         Click here to set the impersonation rights in Exchange server using powershell for Exchange 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010

         Click here to set the impersonation rights in Exchange server using powershell for Exchange 2007

     2. On the target server:

        Ensure that you have a global admin account with a mailbox for Auto Registration of EdbMails application on your Entra ID (Azure Active Directory). However, you can use either a global admin account or any user account with full access rights in the Manual Registration method.

   • Step 8: Verify the mailbox of the admin account

     Check to see if the admin account that has been assigned management roles has a valid and non-hidden mailbox on the Exchange 2010 server. This property also applies to all the other user mailboxes.

   • Step 9: Configure Office 365 to send and receive large messages

      Follow the steps to increase the message size on Office 365 to 150MB.

3. Steps to migrate Exchange 2010 to Office 365 using EdbMails:

   Once you have completed the necessary pre-migration tasks, utilize the EdbMails Exchange migration tool for Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration.

   • Step 1: Download and Install EdbMails software
     • Download EdbMails and install the EdbMails application on any Windows computer that can connect to your source and target Exchange servers.
     • Open the application and log in with the appropriate credentials or click the ‘Start Your Free Trial’ button.
     • Refer to the detailed list of EdbMails system requirements for Exchange migration.

       

     • Choose the migration method as 'Live Exchange Migration'.

       

   • Step 2: Connect to source Exchange 2010 server
     • In the ‘Connect to Exchange Server (Source)’ window, choose the required connection options.

       

        EdbMails Exchange server connection methods
     • With EdbMails, you can migrate mailboxes, perform Exchange 2010 Public folder migration to Office 365 and also migrate In-Place Archives.
     • Enter Exchange 2010 server details and click the ‘Login’ button

       

     • After successfully logging into the source Exchange server, you can conveniently load the mailboxes. EdbMails simplifies this process by automatically loading your source On-Premises mailboxes, saving you the hassle of manual intervention and streamlining your migration experience. You can also load the mailboxes using a CSV file, providing you with the flexibility to customize your migration approach based on your specific requirements.
   • Step 3: Select the Exchange 2010 mailboxes
     • Choose the mailboxes and folders from Exchange 2010 that you wish to migrate to Office 365.

        Tip: If you're migrating with EdbMails for the first time, the process will be a full migration. Subsequent migrations from the same source to the target are incremental. If you encounter duplicate items in your Exchange 2010 mailboxes, EdbMails offers a Duplicate Email Remover tool that efficiently removes duplicate emails, contacts, and calendars.

     • Click 'Migrate to Office 365' to initiate the connection with the target server.

       

   • Step 4: Connect to target Office 365 server
     • Select the required registration method and click the ‘Login’ button

       

        Know more details about target Office 365 server connection with EdbMails
   • Step 5: Mapping source and target mailboxes
     • Choose the required mailbox mapping option

       

     • EdbMails automatically creates mailboxes on your target server and assigns the required licenses.

        Click here to know more about automatic mailbox creation.

     • After successfully creating mailboxes on your target server, EdbMails automatically maps mailboxes and folders between source and target tenants, which is particularly beneficial for large-scale migrations. Alternatively, you have the flexibility to manually map source folders and subfolders to specific target locations as needed.

       

     • EdbMails offers advanced filters to help you tailor the migration process. For instance, with the date filter feature, you can migrate items received within a certain date range .

   • Step 6: Initiate migration from Exchange 2010 to Office 365
     • After completing the mailbox mapping, click the ‘Continue’ button and enter the job name and proceed. Upon successful migration completion, EdbMails displays the migration completion message. You can click the 'View Log' button to check the migration report. Also, log in to your target server to confirm the migration of items, including emails, calendars, and contacts etc. You can also pause or resume the migration if necessary.

       

4. Exchange 2010 to Office 365 post migration tasks:

   The following post-migration activities assist you in ensuring proper mail flow, allowing your users to receive emails correctly.

   • Step 1: Modify the MX records to route to Office 365.

     To enable email reception on Office 365, modify the DNS records, particularly the MX records, to ensure compatibility with your newly migrated server. Additionally, configure the Autodiscover record to allow Outlook to connect seamlessly to the migrated mailboxes.

   • Step 2: Set Up a New Outlook Profile for Users in the Updated Domain

     Since Outlook 2010 is no longer supported, upgrade to the most recent Microsoft Office suite to prevent compatibility problems. If users encounter issues connecting Outlook to Office 365 mailboxes, manually configure their Outlook profiles for the domain.

   • Step 3: Decommission and uninstall Exchange 2010 server

     After a few days, verify that you are receiving emails properly and that everything is functioning as anticipated. Then, follow Microsoft's guidelines to uninstall Exchange Server 2010.

     • Review the Essential Tasks After Completing Your Exchange 2010 to 365 migration.

5. Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration troubleshooting:

   Check the Exchange migration troubleshooting guide for possible solutions to typical migration errors. For further information regarding EdbMails Exchange migration, please visit the frequently asked questions (FAQs) section.

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Additional resources:

• EdbMails Exchange migration software
• Exchange 2013 to Office 365 migration
• Exchange 2016 to Office 365 migration
• Exchange 2019 to Office 365 migration
• Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration