One of the most common question people ask me about Office 365 is, what migration options are available in Office 365.
Office 365 offers 3 main migration options and they are:
- Cutover Migration
- Staged Migration
- Hybrid Migration
- Cutover Migration – In this scenario the organization have less than 1000 mailboxes and they are planning to migrate all users in one batch over the weekend or a few days.
- In this case Active Directory sync is not configured and Office 365 will create the users as part of the migration process.
- We use Office 365 Admin Center to migrate the users
- The On premises Exchange is Exchange 2003 , 2007 with Outlook Anywhere configured.
- Staged Migration – In this scenario the organization have less than 1000 mailboxes and they are planning to migrate all users In a few batches over a period of a few weeks.
- In this case Active Directory sync is configured and enabled.
- We use Office 365 Admin Center to migrate the users
- Hybrid Migration – In this scenario you have more than 1000 mailboxes, This is one of the most popular migration method for large organization.
- In this case we use Active Directory Federation to setup SSO (Single sign on) between the on premises Exchange and Office 365.
- On premises Exchange is running Exchange 2010 SP3 or Exchange 2013