Office 365: Open ports?

[peterfarrell]

Hi there,

 

I'd appreciate some help from someone who may of done this already. I know I need to add an mx record but what ports do I need put in my request for change through Link2ICT so I can install and enable full functionality to Office 365. Thanks in advance.

[foofighterjim]

I didn't have to change a thing re ports. O365 uses ports 80 and 443, it is pretty much just the MX records you need to worry about (and moving mailbox data).

[peterfarrell]

Hi foofighterjim,

 

Thank you for the fast reply. Did you change from Link2ICT? If yes were they OK about it or did they make your life awkward? Any advance info about migrating would be very much appreciated, cheers.

[foofighterjim]

Yes, moved from link. I'm sure your aware by now but it can sometimes take them days to process RFCs properly. Biggest headache was that they would only enable 10 Zimbra accounts at a time for IMAP access, you need this enabled to move the mailbox data to O365. (@Little-Miss please help, did they mention that they would now enable the whole domain during the meeting or did I just imagine that part?) I only moved my staff accounts and that took just over a week with the need to do 10 at a time. If I had a free run at it I could have moved the 120 staff accounts in about a day.

 

They were ok with me but I was very clear about what I was doing and why I was doing it. Make sure you pass on all the DNS information from the O365 portal, the only one I didn't do was the Link online part as we have no intention of using it.

[FN-GM]

What component are we talking here? Lync Online requires more ports to be opened.

 

Thanks

[peterfarrell]

Thanks again for this very useful advice, I'm at that particular school on Monday so I'll discuss it with the head. Another option I was thinking about was to buy a domain name (£5.00 for a year) and run both emails alongside each other so we could have a gradual migration. What do you think?

[Michael]

When you sign up with Office 365, the console itself will tell you the network changes required to your existing .bham.sch.uk domain. You can include all components - Exchange, Lync and SharePoint or just Exchange - it's entirely up to you.

 

Personally I'd stick with the same domain - I think it's important schools keep their domain identities.

 

You only need to request additional ports to be opened if you use Microsoft Outlook configured as POP, which to be honest is kind of pointless these days. Keep everything in the cloud and use OWA or IMAP using Microsoft Outlook.

[Boredguy]

Just adding my penny to the discussion.

 

When we migrated last summer, we did not need to get any ports opened to allow Lync or any other portion of Office 365 to function.

I had to get SWGfL to open IMAP for my old mail server to migrate the e-mail, but all the Office 365 traffic went via 80 and 443.

 

The Admin portal does say what needs to be configured and it's mainly DNS entries. I would get the Lync enter added even if you are not planning on rolling it out to all your staff, as it's very handy to get in touch with fellow IT bods and I've used the share desktop a couple of times helping friends out with their network issues.

[foofighterjim]

Thanks again for this very useful advice, I'm at that particular school on Monday so I'll discuss it with the head. Another option I was thinking about was to buy a domain name (£5.00 for a year) and run both emails alongside each other so we could have a gradual migration. What do you think?

 

If it is just for migration purposes I wouldn't bother with that. Setup the domain on O365 (with the MX still pointing at Zimbra) with empty email accounts. Give the staff any relevant O365 login information and get the MX swapped, internal mail will still work on O365 even without the MX change so the DNS change will only affect external mail coming in. Make sure that external inbound mail is now hitting O365 (this can take a few hours). Once you are happy that no new mail is hitting the old accounts start migrations using IMAP. Link will probably also rename you Zimbra accounts to @old-.

[Cache]

The only port I remember asking to be opened was port 587 to allow SMTP to work for our mail relay.

[peterfarrell]

Thanks to everyone for your help, hope to implement soon. Had a shed load of Ipads and a Mac Mini server to set up (total newbie to Macs). Cheers.

[Michael]

Unfortunately Link2ICT have the rather bazaar policy of requiring schools still to use their SMTP server rather than Microsoft's or Google's, which to me doesn't really make sense.

 

If a school migrates away, the school should be using Microsoft's or Google's own SMTP servers, so quite rightly it's no longer Link2ICT's responsibility. Otherwise you have to question, if ever there was a problem (depending on the nature of the problem), it's not always straight forward to diagnose the issue between two different providers.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's still know KB article regarding this - hint hint