How to migrate your email accounts to Microsoft Office 365 - Exchange Online.
Your organization may want to migrate email from a local (exchange) server Office 365. This video shows you all the possibilities for getting for migrating your email. Your administrators, who needs to be Exchange organization admins by the way, can migrate mailboxes from Exchange Server or migrate email from another IMAP-enabled email system. Your users can import their own email, contacts, and other mailbox information to an Office 365 mailbox which is created for them. Often, organizations work with a partner to (bulk) migrate their email. Most commonly this is done during an upgrade of the internal IT systems, in order make the users downtime as low as possible. Before you start an email migration, review all the limitations and best practices for Exchange Online to make sure you get the performance and behavior that you expect after the migration. For information on choosing the best option for your organization, see the Decide on a migration path or contact your Exchange migration advisors, or even an independent advisor if you doubt your supplier. Basically, there are three types of email migrations that can be made from an existing Exchange Server.
Migrate all mailboxes at once (cutover migration) or Express migration
You can use this type of migration if you're running Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, 2013, 2016 or Exchange 2019, and if there are fewer than 2000 mailboxes. You can perform a cutover migration by starting from the EAC; for more information, just Google for "Perform a cutover migration to Microsoft 365 or Office 365". For information on how to get started with the Express migration, see Use express migration to migrate Exchange mailboxes to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. With cutover migration, you can move up to 2000 mailboxes, but due to length of time it takes to create and migrate 2000 users, it's more reasonable to migrate 150 users or less. There are several good migration tools available in the market that can copy your mailbox data by time periods, so the remaining data is not too large on the final cutover.
Migrate mailboxes in batches (staged migration)
This method is best used in a migration when you are running Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007, and if there are more than 2000 mailboxes. For an overview of staged migration, see What you need to know about a staged email migration to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. To perform the migration tasks, just look for the pages about "Perform a staged migration of Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2007 to Microsoft 365 or Office 365".
Migrate using an integrated Exchange Server and Microsoft 365 or Office 365 environment (hybrid)
This is the favorite method of larger ISP's and in this type of migration you can maintain both on-premises and online mailboxes for your organization and gradually migrate users and email to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. This scenario is the obvious one if:
You have Exchange 2010 and more than 150-2,000 mailboxes.
You have Exchange 2010 and want to migrate mailboxes in small batches over time.
You have Exchange 2013 or later.
For more information, just look for the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 mail migration advisor.
Use the Import Service to migrate PST files
If your organization is using has many large PST files, you can use the Import Service to migrate email data to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. An Exchange Online administrator migrates PST files to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 but also users are able to use the Upload service, either to upload the PST files through a network, or to mail the PST files towards a (shared) drive that you prepare.
Migrate email from another IMAP-enabled email system
You can use the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) to migrate user email from Gmail, Exchange, Outlook.com, and other email systems that support IMAP migration. When you migrate the user's email by using IMAP, only the items in the users' inbox or other mail folders are migrated. Contacts, calendar items, and tasks can't be migrated with IMAP; but the user can manually migrate them. IMAP migration also doesn't create mailboxes in Microsoft 365 or Office 365. You'll have to create a mailbox for each user before you migrate their email. To migrate email from another mail system, Just Google for "Migrate your IMAP mailboxes to Microsoft 365 or Office 365". After the email migration is done, any new mail sent to the source email isn't migrated.
Users can import their own email, contacts, and other mailbox information to Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
Work with a partner to migrate email
If none of the types of migrations described will work for your organization, consider working with a partner to migrate your email to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. It is something they do on a regular basis and they have experience with it, downgrading the risk of losing data for your organization and making the migrations as smooth as possible.
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