HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 4,229
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
No real surprises, just venting some frustration. We have a small utility company (rural water) as a client. 6 employees, all previously on IMAP mail from Bluehost. We've been working on them for a while to migrate to M365 and finally got the ok at the end of last month. This should have been an easy job.
Complication #1 - it took 2 weeks to get their tax exempt status properly recognized by our M365 reseller. Sherweb is pretty good in a lot of ways, but this was ridiculous.
Complication #2, the client doesn't have direct control over their DNS. Their website was built and is maintained by a one-guy company who is apparently reselling Bluehost services. All of his clients are controlled through a single login, so he couldn't share that with us, but instead asked that we just give him the needed changes and he would make them. I knew this would slow things down, but I had no idea how much. We setup the MS tenant and asked for the initial verification TXT record a week ago this past Monday. It took him until Saturday evening to input that record, which we couldn't then work with until Monday morning. Wow. I kept the client aware of the impact this was having and it looks like once the dust settles, they are going to move away from this guy's services - so yea for that, I guess. Apparently some direct words were had, and when we asked for the rest of the changes on Monday afternoon, they were in place by Tuesday evening. Better, but still way slower than when you have direct control over the DNS.
Complication #3, All of the employees but 1 were using regular desktop Outlook, so it was merely a job of backing up the email, contacts & calendars to a PST file, creating a new Outlook profile for M365 & them importing the saved PST once they were logged in and 2FA enabled. 1 employee, who was their main field guy only had a laptop, and we had to work by remoting in while he was driving around in his service truck. The laptop had a cellular connection, so as long as he had a good signal, this went ok, but would randomly drop the connection whenever he drove through an area with a bad connection. That was fun.
Complication #4. Service guy had gotten a new laptop in March and had setup his email on New Outlook. IMAP, non-Microsoft account - which cripples the already scant feature set this app has. He had created dozens of folders, and 3 separate calendars with dozens of repeating events off into the future. No exporting email from the app, no exporting or access to the calendars, which are stored locally, but not in a way that you can do anything with the data.
I tried logging into webmail for that old account, and their webmail client didn't support exporting either - and, none of the folders created had synced back up to the server, and of course the calendars didn't either.
I couldn't put the new email in New Outlook either because it was the same email address - you can't have two accounts with the same email going at the same time in one client - no surprise there, I guess.
So in order to get anything at all, I had to create a separate profile in Outlook classic to connect to their old IMAP email (which took a while since I had to stumble onto the exact configuration of ports and encryption settings that would work since their documentation was.....lacking.) Once this was working, I made sure all of the IMAP folders were synced, but obviously only got inbox & sent items, probably less than 50% of the email he wanted.
I broke the bad news that he was going to have to recreate his calendars (and all of the events) and all of his folders, then individually forward each email in each of those folders to himself to get it into Outlook classic where his new email account was. He was less than pleased, but recognized there wasn't much else to be done.
I think I am going to be the last person on earth to switch to New Outlook. I'm just hoping they send me a survey at some point about why I'm dragging my feet.
Complication #1 - it took 2 weeks to get their tax exempt status properly recognized by our M365 reseller. Sherweb is pretty good in a lot of ways, but this was ridiculous.
Complication #2, the client doesn't have direct control over their DNS. Their website was built and is maintained by a one-guy company who is apparently reselling Bluehost services. All of his clients are controlled through a single login, so he couldn't share that with us, but instead asked that we just give him the needed changes and he would make them. I knew this would slow things down, but I had no idea how much. We setup the MS tenant and asked for the initial verification TXT record a week ago this past Monday. It took him until Saturday evening to input that record, which we couldn't then work with until Monday morning. Wow. I kept the client aware of the impact this was having and it looks like once the dust settles, they are going to move away from this guy's services - so yea for that, I guess. Apparently some direct words were had, and when we asked for the rest of the changes on Monday afternoon, they were in place by Tuesday evening. Better, but still way slower than when you have direct control over the DNS.
Complication #3, All of the employees but 1 were using regular desktop Outlook, so it was merely a job of backing up the email, contacts & calendars to a PST file, creating a new Outlook profile for M365 & them importing the saved PST once they were logged in and 2FA enabled. 1 employee, who was their main field guy only had a laptop, and we had to work by remoting in while he was driving around in his service truck. The laptop had a cellular connection, so as long as he had a good signal, this went ok, but would randomly drop the connection whenever he drove through an area with a bad connection. That was fun.
Complication #4. Service guy had gotten a new laptop in March and had setup his email on New Outlook. IMAP, non-Microsoft account - which cripples the already scant feature set this app has. He had created dozens of folders, and 3 separate calendars with dozens of repeating events off into the future. No exporting email from the app, no exporting or access to the calendars, which are stored locally, but not in a way that you can do anything with the data.
I tried logging into webmail for that old account, and their webmail client didn't support exporting either - and, none of the folders created had synced back up to the server, and of course the calendars didn't either.
I couldn't put the new email in New Outlook either because it was the same email address - you can't have two accounts with the same email going at the same time in one client - no surprise there, I guess.
So in order to get anything at all, I had to create a separate profile in Outlook classic to connect to their old IMAP email (which took a while since I had to stumble onto the exact configuration of ports and encryption settings that would work since their documentation was.....lacking.) Once this was working, I made sure all of the IMAP folders were synced, but obviously only got inbox & sent items, probably less than 50% of the email he wanted.
I broke the bad news that he was going to have to recreate his calendars (and all of the events) and all of his folders, then individually forward each email in each of those folders to himself to get it into Outlook classic where his new email account was. He was less than pleased, but recognized there wasn't much else to be done.
I think I am going to be the last person on earth to switch to New Outlook. I'm just hoping they send me a survey at some point about why I'm dragging my feet.
