Office 365 Planning Guide

Office 365 presents many challenges to companies wishing to move their e-mail from either POP3 or an in-house Exchange server. There are a number of critical planning steps that need to be completed to ensure a smooth transition to Office 365. Office 365 has a number of planning tools to help facilitate the planning process. After having implemented Exchange on Office 365, we can report the tools are useful, but they do not contain all of the available options or methods needed to complete a successful migration.

After a decision has been made to move to Office 365 and the account has been setup, the method of use for Office 365 needs to be determined. Office 365 can either work in a stand-alone mode or it may be integrated with Windows Active Directory on your domain. A typical installation will be stand-alone. In a stand- alone installation, the user mail boxes will need to be created for each user. In setting up the account, enough mail boxes for each unique user needs to be purchased. As each user is setup, the license count is decreased by one, so that a company may run out of licenses if they aren’t careful. One planning consideration is the use of “alias” e-mail accounts which allow one mail box to receive the e-mail from multiple e-mail addresses. For example, the e-mail address sales@deckerwright.com is “aliased” to the e-mail box of the person responsible for sales. This saves a license and gets the e-mail to the right person. If the person moves, the “aliased” account may be moved to another employee.

In larger organizations, Active Directory synchronization could save significant administrative time. Rather than having to maintain two lists of employees, disabling or deleting an account on the local Windows server performs the same function on the Office 365 Exchange server. While this is desirable, the customer must have Windows Server 2008 implemented on their network with fully functional public keys to facilitate server federation. In this environment, the Office 365 Exchange server and the local Exchange server can co-exist to facilitate mailbox migration.

After the decision is made to pursue either a stand-alone or Active Directory Sync implementation, time must be spent analyzing the DNS setup of the company. Both internal and external DNS records must be examined to determine “A”, “CNAME” and “MX” records that will need to be either modified, added or deleted during the setup process. At DeckerWright Corporation we had to modify both internal and external DNS records for the system to function properly. A customer must have access to the external DNS system to make changes. This often requires getting the account credentials from the current service provider.

In order for the Office 365 migration to move smoothly and to eliminate unwanted spam and reduce the risk of infections, a cloud based spam filter, like Tri Net Technology's Wrightway SpamStop, should be included as part of the solution. Wrightway Spam Stop not only provides comprehensive spam filtering and virus cleaning, but also provides for e-mail spooling in the event there is a problem with the Microsoft Office 365 service. The Wrightway Spam Stop spooler will store e-mail if something happens to the Office 365 Exchange server, the DNS records are incorrectly setup, or the e-mail boxes are improperly setup. Another key feature of Wrightway Spam Stop is the ability to switch the destination of e-mail, instantaneously changing where e-mail is flowing rather than waiting for DNS changes to ripple through the Internet.

The final step in the planning process is to determine the migration methodology for getting the user’s e-mail moved into the Office 365 cloud. Methods include Exchange to Exchange migrations, IMAP migrations and PST file imports. Care must be taken to ensure that if the PST file import option is used that the plan includes e-mail box clean up to make sure the PST file size is below 2 GIGs.

Once the tasks are identified during the planning process, they can be scheduled for completion. Typical migrations will run from days to weeks depending on the number of users, the DNS setup and whether Active Directory synchronization is part of the solution. DeckerWright Corporation is a leader in the planning, implementation and migration into Office 365. Contact us today to begin the process!

About the Author:

Marshall Wright teaches at Brookdale Community College in the Electronic Health Record curriculum provided by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT. Marshall’s sessions focus on EHR vendor selection and clinical quality improvement including a session dissecting the 25 measures of stage one “Meaningful Use”.

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