How much would you do the following work for? (office 365 migration)

Soldato
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Just trying to get a rough idea of the costs of an Office 365 migration.

Basically want to move all of our emails accounts from our onsite exchange 2010 up to hosted exchange on Office 365. I'm a bit apprehensive about undertaking something like this myself as admittedly the Exchange stuff is my weakest area so wouldn't want to undertake it on my own for fear of messing it up!

We have 70 mailboxes (50 of which are currently used, rest are ex-employees), the Exchange data store is about 98GB.

We're a charity so we get the 365 licenses for free. I've already signed us up and verified our domain so I think the only thing left to do really is the actual migration and the MX/DNS changes.

I'm sure there will be something that I've missed off or not considered and I know its a bit of a vague project but what would the rough prices be to get someone to come in and do this work?

From my understanding there's probably no more than half a days work of actually checking our existing config and double checking the 365 account is set up correctly then the rest of the time will be time spent waiting for the mailboxes to be uploaded.
 
Are you going to do a cut over migration or implement a hybrid configuration, its a lot more than a few hours work.

There are throttling policies in place that will really slow down the speed of any upload and you need to think about everything outside of the main mailboxes, any delegated permissions, do the users want SSO, DirSync.. and so on.

If you are not sure, then get someone in to do it before you need someone to fix it afterwards.
 
Being a Charity the licensing cost for Exchange 2010 (and every other MS product for that matter) is pittance.

For the reasons listed by Spooter is why I'd like us to shift from on-site exchange to hosted! Was going to try and do it myself but not 100% confident hence why I was asking for ball park figures for a migration!
 
Are you going to do a cut over migration or implement a hybrid configuration, its a lot more than a few hours work.

There are throttling policies in place that will really slow down the speed of any upload and you need to think about everything outside of the main mailboxes, any delegated permissions, do the users want SSO, DirSync.. and so on.

If you are not sure, then get someone in to do it before you need someone to fix it afterwards.

I'm not sure what type of migration. Probably a hybrid deployment as I imagine it would be easier to move mailboxes over a few at a time and make sure they are working.

I was toying with the idea of maybe just moving my own mailbox over to see how it works but think i may have to get a specialist in for it just to save me any hassle!
 
Hybrid is the most complicated process, its worth getting someone in for it.

As for a figure, how long is a piece of string... if everything went smoothly with no issues its a few days work for the actual hybrid configuration, then planning for the pilot and migration.

I used to work for MS in the Exchange Online escalation team so I know what can happen if its not planned properly.
 
Just going back to this.......I've been speaking to someone about doing the migration and they've stated that if you have an onsite AD domain and then you decommission your onsite exchange to move to a hosted exchange with office365 then you can't assign email accounts (or do any of the email account editing) on your AD accounts etc without using ADSIedit.

He said the best way to do the migration would be to do a hybrid migration and set up a new 2013 Exchange server so that you can keep the ability to edit account properties easily still and also have an onsite relay for MFD's like printers etc.

Sorry if ive not made a great deal of sense but is what he is saying correct? I thought the whole point of getting rid of onsite Exchange and moving to 365 was so you could decommission your onpremises stuff and manage it all from the cloud? It seems like hes saying im still going to need an Exchange server on site which I didnt really want. I wanted to be Exchange free!!!!
 
PS. You probably want the middle one (directory sync with password sync).
 
Just had a read of it and it looks like that is the one we need.

So with that, say if I create a new user in our AD, would i just go into Office 365 and create a new user with the same name etc and it would auto sync the two and give the email attributes to the AD account?
 
I haven't set it up myself, but it should stay in sync. So you create and manage the AD from your end, and you provision mailboxes from the O365 interface. Does that make sense? Bear in mind that there may be a sync delay, i.e. you create a new AD account at your end, may then take e.g. 15 minutes to replicate up to O365 for you to then see the account in order to provision the mailbox.

I hope I'm right on this. Just going on logic. =)
 
FWIW, the customer I have on 365 uses Client SMTP submission for relaying from MFPs etc - covered here. Works fine using TLS (port 587) and means port 25 can remain blocked outgoing.
 
DirSync will create the mailbox in Office 365 next time it Syncs, you can control how often that Syncs when setting up DirSync. There may be SOME attributes you can only edit through ADSIEdit, but the majority from what we have seen so far are normal attributes edited as you would do through ADUC. Using DirySync reduces duplication of effort as you don't need to create the accounts in two places. In addition it will sync the password hash to Office 365 so your users can use the same password they use for their domain login.
 
Yeh thats what I thought the purpose of DirSync was.

However this external IT consultant is telling me its best to have an onsite Exchange 2013 server to still allow me to make changes to accounts.

Alls I want it to do is when I create the AD account for 365 to then automatically create the user mailbox for the account as well and all be nice and lovely. I'm not sure exactly what features i'm going to be missing by not having the proposed Exchange 2013 server in hybrid setup.
 
FWIW, the customer I have on 365 uses Client SMTP submission for relaying from MFPs etc - covered here. Works fine using TLS (port 587) and means port 25 can remain blocked outgoing.

What credentials are you using if you're using a shared mailbox? Or are you licensing an extra user just to send email from a MFD?
 
£6.31 an hour, same as usual lol.

Seriously what your describing is a basic "follow the wizards instructions and don't do anything stupid" level job, just read up beforehand and it's very easy/smooth to do, I would advise using the Microsoft connectivity analyser tool beforehand to make sure everything is ship shape and ready to go.
 
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If you can read an Exchange migration document and understand what it means and you're getting paid minimum wage then the joke's on you.
 
Recently performed a staged migration from Exchange 2007 SP3 to Office 365 E1. I have plenty of experience with cross forest domain migrations however, this was my first Office 365 migration.
Whilst it was relatively simple, there are a fair few "gotchas" that aren't in the MS guides.

You don't need an on prem server imho.
Once you have your AD sync tools setup, migrate your mailboxes to O365, decommission the on prem server and manage everything online.
 
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