Migrating to the Cloud (Office 365 & Azure)

When you use Migration Manager for Active Directory/Exchange to migrate to Office 365 you will manage the project using 2 software consoles “Migration Manager for AD (Office 365)” and “Migration Manager”. There are 2 main phases when you migrate your environment to Office 365. First there is the user account creation/matching followed by the mailbox synchronization.

Phase 1: User Account Creation/Matching

The “Migration Manager for AD (Office 365)” console is used to create/match objects to your Office 365 tenant. From here you can create your type of collection (used to manage objects) into either a static or dynamic collection. How do you choose which collection to use, here is a list that you can use to help you select which type of collection suits your needs?

Static Collections can be used to:

• Migrate a group of objects with non-default mapping or matching rules
  • Directly with objects, by executing queries or by importing objects from .CSV files
• Re-migrate groups after their members were migrated to Microsoft Office 365 to resolve group membership
• Synchronize a group of objects to keep their attributes actual in Microsoft Office 365
• Re-migrate users after their mailboxes have been created in Microsoft Office 365 for migration of the following mailbox attributes to Microsoft Office 365:
  • The mailbox and the Send As permissions
  • The linked attributes such as group membership, the Send On Behalf permission, the publicDelegates attribute, and the others.

Dynamic Collections can be used to:

• Synchronize all objects from Active Directory domain with Microsoft Office 365 to maintain a unified global address list (GAL)
  • By specifying a particular container in Active Directory domain and a filter to apply to it Note that dynamic collections are updated automatically when content of the container is changed.

Once the collections are created you’re able to migrate the objects from on-prem to Office 365.

Phase 2: Mailbox Synchronization

Using the “Migration Manager” console you will be able to start to synchronize mailboxes from your on-prem Exchange Server to Office 365. Just like in phase 1, we use collections to manage objects during the synchronization phase. There are 2 types of collections when synchronizing mailboxes to Office 365: Calendar and Mailbox collections. Which collection should be setup first? There is no specific order that either collection needs to be setup first.

Each business has different requirements for their users and being able to configure Migration Manager to meet those needs is what gives the product the scalability to be used for any size of organization moving to Office 365. So whether your migration project calls for a single day cut-over or a co-existence period, Migration Manager is able to meet the specific needs for your migration project.