Migrate Email to Office 365

[donte10]

I have a new client that has a crashed exchange server 2003 (server will not boot up -- no operating system found error). They've been contemplating going to Office 365 and now that this crashed has occurred they want to make the jump.

My question to you is, how do I migrate the clients old email from the exchange server to Office 365? They do not have access to their old email, except via their Outlook .ost file.

Direction needed... thanks in advance.

 

[cyabro]

If you can still view the emails in Outlook then export the lot to a PST file and make sure it's all there then remove the current exchange account and add the office 365 account.
They could then import the emails into the Office 365 account from the PST file created earlier or, as I like to do to start fresh, is just open the PST file in Outlook as well then the Office 365 folders are all clean but you can still go back and find old emails if you need to.
I do import contacts, calendar and tasks if needed.

Oh and what version of Outlook are they running as Office 365 requires 2007 or above, it won't work with Outlook 2003 or older?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

How badly is Exchange crashed? Outlook running in cached mode (so there's a local .OST...has to open under that users domain account and MAPI profile in order to export it to a .PST. You cannot convert an OST to a PST without being logged in with that users domain account...using native MS tools.

There are some 3rd party tools out there...some free, most are pay for...and I'm sure the Google search engine will bring in some of those spammers to spam up this thread with their products before this week is over. (hello phoenix and stellar spammers from india). I wouldn't use their products.

Did the Exchange server have any backup? Can you at least mount a recovery storage group and exmerge mailboxes to a PST?

 

[drjones]

Assuming Outlook was running in cached mode, can't you just export to .PST from the workstations, or does that require them to be actively connected to the exchange server?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Assuming Outlook was running in cached mode, can't you just export to .PST from the workstations, or does that require them to be actively connected to the exchange server?

My second sentence above.....in my first reply..."Outlook has to be logged in under the users domain account and the MAPI profile in order to export to .PST..you cannot convert without..."

 

[drjones]

My second sentence above.....in my first reply..."Outlook has to be logged in under the users domain account and the MAPI profile in order to export to .PST..you cannot convert without..."

Yes I saw that but was thinking you could possibly still export to .PST just using the cached OST data....guess not....thank you for the info.

 

[cyabro]

Yes I saw that but was thinking you could possibly still export to .PST just using the cached OST data....guess not....thank you for the info.

Yes you can as I have done it many times, you don't have to have a connection to the Exchange server to export to a PST file.
As long as Outlook is opening and you can view all your mail then you are good to go.
You may need to turn the computer off, disconnect the network cable, then power back on and log in without a connection to the network/domain as I have seen on the odd occasion Outlook won't open if it thinks it is connected to the network but can't connect to the Exchange server.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yes you can as I have done it many times, you don't have to have a connection to the Exchange server to export to a PST file.
As long as Outlook is opening and you can view all your mail then you are good to go.
You may need to turn the computer off, disconnect the network cable, then power back on and log in without a connection to the network/domain as I have seen on the odd occasion Outlook won't open if it thinks it is connected to the network but can't connect to the Exchange server.

Which falls under what I described...as long as you're logging in under that domain users account. Outlooks MAPI profile is based on your AD login.

 

[donte10]

Solution: I wanted to respond to let you know what solution got this client up and running in a short period of time. They were only down for a few hours.

Note: The .ost did not require a connection to the server in order to export to a .pst file. That was my initial concern, but the client was using Outlook in 'cached mode' so it ended up working. I was able to export the .ost file as a .pst.

- I set the client up with an Office 365/hosted email account
- Setup their MX records to point to office 365.
- (I set up their mobile phones with the office 365 account, so they would be able to see their email as they arrived, while the computers were being worked on).
- Then I setup Outlook with the new office 365 account.
- Once the new account was setup in Outlook, I imported the .pst file into the new email account.
- The conversion of the .ost file to the .pst is what was most time consuming. As well as the upload to the new account. It does depend on the size of their mailbox and folders. Some clients will decide to start 'fresh' and use the .pst file as a reference/archive.

The entire process went rather smooth. I'm a big fan of Office 365 - I have a few clients using it.