Office 365 Migration Advice / Tips / Recommendations

[adamholt1]

Hi,

 

To set the scene.......

 

Planning to move from on premises Exchange 2013 to Office 365.

 

 

• We currently have 197 mailboxes
  
• around 500GB worth of data
  

 

we are looking to cut this down quite a bit though and hope to get the mailbox number down to around the 150 as some of them aren't necessarily 'used' (just used to forward emails on as part of a MAT).

 

 

How would you recommend migrating to O365 - would you say a cutover migration would be easiest for us or a hybrid deployment/migration?

 

We would be doing this in the school holidays so downtime would be factored in as well as we are planning to have the majority of staff using the O365 OWA - only key admin & SLT staff that would need Outlook re-configuring?

 

 

Initially research done by myself suggested a cutover migration would be the best suited however following a conference call with a 3rd party supplier, they have recommended a Hybrid configuration so in the middle now!

 

 

Thanks in advance.

[snagrat]

Are you planning on running ADSync at all?

[nadeem]

Personally I would suggest a cut over migration - that's what I did for around the same amount of mailboxes

[adamholt1]

Are you planning on running ADSync at all?

 

 

Hi,

 

Yes, we will be planning on using DirSync.

[zag]

Yeh we swapped over a similar amount of mailboxes in 2 days. We moved everyones email over to a pst file and attached locally which could be done during the school day easily. This meant there was hardly any data to move on the actual migration day.

 

Didn't migrate the students. It was pretty easy to do to be honest.

 

No need for hybrid complications imo