Exchange to GMail Advice / Gotcha?

[bjohnny42]

Hi All,

 

We are looking at moving from Exchange 2010 to GMail for mail. Chromebooks and G-Suite are becoming more of the every day. Does anyone have any gotcha's things they would have done better differently things that have gone well. Would ideally like to trial a small subset before larger groups.

 

Currently mulling over looking at cloudm https://cloudm.co/ or a DIY. https://support.google.com/a/answer/180898?hl=en G-Suite Migration for Exchange. https://support.google.com/a/topic/9064794 .

 

Pupils will probably lose all old email selected staff will get an opportunity to move mailboxes but we will encourage removal where possible.

 

Have some had success with moving mail between exchange and gmail using drag and dropping from within outlook?

Edited May 2, 2019 by bjohnny42

[supportman]

Exchange 2008, wow thats old

 

When we did this 10 years ago we just made PST's for teachers and wiped the students emails at the end of the school year.

 

I don't remember any issues and it was done in less that 24hrs. I'm sure there are more modern migration methods now but the system worked quite well just using the outlook client and as you say drag and drop.

 

We also changed our domain at the same time to something a lot shorter than the old .sch.uk addresses which meant we could do a lot of the prep work beforehand.

[smurfomatic]

Did this three years ago - used the G Suite Migration for Exchange. Ours was Exchange 2003 so even older! All went smoothly, staff had been asked to sort through and delete unneeded emails (so that didn't happen, obviously) but we ran through the mailbox transfer in batches and everything copied over fine except a few emails with large attachments. Kept a copy of the Exchange server just in case but never needed to retrieve anything.

 

Once emails were transferred and domain name switched over all worked perfectly.

[Arthur]

Have some had success with moving mail between exchange and gmail using drag and dropping from within outlook?

Dragging and dropping e-mails across using Outlook sounds like it would be a right faff and very time consuming if you have a lot of accounts.

 

I would try GSMME first since it's free and not too difficult to setup. It worked well when I needed to migrate mailboxes from our old Exchange 2010 server to G Suite.

 

One (stupid) gotcha I found was with the user mapping CSV file. Don't include "sourceuser, destinationuser" as headers since GSMME will display several errors and it's not obvious what the issue is. It will send you on a wild goose chase!

 

Something else I did was to export all of the mailboxes to PSTs using the PowerShell script below.

 

$Date = Get-Date -UFormat "%Y-%m-%d"
$Destination = "\\NAS\Backups\Mailboxes"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path "$Destination\$Date" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Out-Null

$Mailboxes = Get-Mailbox -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq "UserMailbox") -or (RecipientTypeDetails -eq "SharedMailbox")} –ResultSize Unlimited -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Sort
$Mailboxes | ForEach {
Write-Output "Exporting $($_.Alias)"
New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox "$($_.Alias)" -FilePath "$Destination\$Date\$($_.Alias).pst" -ExcludeFolders "#JunkEmail#" -BadItemLimit 9999 -AcceptLargeDataLoss
}

Edited May 2, 2019 by Arthur

[bjohnny42]

That should have been Exchange 2010! Now corrected thanks.