Office 365 Migration

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Hi, we are currently working on a migration to O365 here at Duke. As of right now, I know of no way to programmatically migrate existing Exchange users over to O365, and we have the same issue with auto-discover. Nevertheless, yes O365 does need Office 2011 SP3 to the best of my knowledge. Mail.app is particularly painful for some users and it may require rebuilding of the index and mail folders, and doesn't play well with the "Internet Accounts" option in Mavericks System Preferences. Nevertheless, iOS has so far been much smoother. I am aware of some work in this area in the beta for 10.9.2, but that is covered in NDA. Sorry I can't be more of a help - I am not looking forward to the moment when this goes live for everyone.

Was there anything different you did for ios deploys?

@mcrispin, thank you for your post here.

I was just informed that my company will be migrating to O365 too.

Wondering if you can share your experience and findings you encountered when your company migrated to O365.

This would me and the JAMF Nation a lot.

I will to share my experience and findings as my company gets more involved on the O365 migration process.

Thank you.

Agreed. This project is just starting to kick off in my organization, and ANY information at all that you can provide would be very useful.

Thanks

About 1-1/2 years ago I moved to a consulting company and we've done quite a few Office 365 migrations from on-premesis Exchange systems. Client applications have included Outlook for Mac and Windows as well as Apple Mail.

Because you'll be moving from one server system to another, Autodiscover may work but it will not prevent the mail clients from flushing their existing cache of messages. We've tried manually changing only the server address within the same accounts on the workstations and the messages still flush. Microsoft has told us this is by design. Apple Mail pretty much does this as well.

My recommendation is to plan to remove old accounts from your mail applications and add the new accounts. Don't try to reuse the already configured accounts. Expect that your users will need to resync/redownload all their mail.

As for migrating the Exchange mail itself, Office 365 does have a tool that allows you to perform a one-way sync from your on-premesis Exchange server to Office 365. It will migrate user accounts, user account data, distribution lists, etc. After the first initial sync, it continues to sync incrementally every 24 hours to keep on-premesis and Office 365 accounts in sync. You then simply cutover DNS when ready.

Prepare for your migration by having your users do simple things:

• Empy the Deleted Items folder and keep it empty.
• Delete mail that's no longer needed.
• Reduce the number of items in Inboxes to a few hundred messages with no sub-folders.

Start with the 30-day Office 365 Enterprise trial and use that time to do your migration. The trial gives you easier access to all the tools you'll need for your migration.

As a Casper user, I would consider creating a Self Service item with a script that safely quits Outlook, Mail or whatever email client you run. Rename the existing cache of messages as a backup (don't just delete user data). Create a new mail account and configure it as needed. You can take my existing Outlook Exchange Setup script and configure it for Office 365 too. Documentation for this version hasn't been updated but this version includes better Active Directory support:

[https://github.com/talkingmoose/Outlook-Exchange-Setup/tree/4.5]("https://github.com/talkingmoose/Outlook-Exchange-Setup/tree/4.5")

Glad to answer more questions here or privately about our experiences.

We just migrated from a hosted Exchange environment to Office 365 last week internally here at JAMF Software. We had some unique challenges since we were migrating from a hosted Exchange environment and we don't bind our Macs to Active Directory. I'd be happy to answer any questions or share information about our experience. I would ultimately echo a lot of what @talkingmoose has already mentioned but perhaps I could add some additional color to his comments since our migration was so recent.

Our company did not have a volume license of Office prior to Office 365, so when I install Office 2011 (14.4.1) with Office 365 license, the "Get Started with Office 2011" screen is displayed. The user is supposed to click "sign in to an existing Office 365 subscription" and authenticate (the screenshot and details on how to bypass it WITH a volume license can be seen at http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/creating-an-office-2011-sp-4-14-4-1-installer/).

Is there any automated/silent way to bypass this screen under these conditions?

Unless you have a volume license installer I'm afraid you're probably out of luck. The online activation process you describe does not store any information locally that you can capture and push to all your devices. A process runs in the background on each machine and verifies your license about every 30 days.

Contact your Microsoft representative and see what you can do about getting a volume license installer.

Allen, I would love to hear how it was done. I too am planning a migration from in internally hosted exchange server to Office 365 hosted. My users are all local not AD, and I'm wondering how to automate the creation of Outlook accounts on the user machines.

@cjatsbm][/url I wanted to point out that we actually migrated from an externally hosted Exchange environment to Office 365. However, you should be able to get the same results using similar processes. We opted to utilize an online tool called MigrationWiz which handles migrating the actual data from one environment to the other. There were some limitations with us using MigrationWiz since we didn't own the Exchange environment and didn't have root access to the file system (something you shouldn't have an issue with).

Setting up the clients depends on what mail client your users prefer:
Mac Mail
We distribute a configuration file containing an Exchange payload utilizing the $EMAIL variable for the email account field. We also enter the appropriate server/port information in the profile.

Mac Outlook
This isn't something we could deploy via a configuration profile. Instead, we deployed scripts through a Self Service policy that prompted users to enter certain information and then the policy would configure Outlook. These scripts were based on what already exists on JAMF Nation: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/viewProductFile.html?fid=534 and https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=4379

iOS Mail
We deployed an iOS configuration profile with an Exchange ActiveSync payload that also utilizes the $EMAIL variable for the email address field.

I hope this helps or at least get you pointed in the right direction. My biggest piece of advice is to make sure you've done your bandwidth calculations correctly in regards to how much time it will take to sync data from your on prem instance out to Office 365 just to turn around and sync it back down to your clients. It took us approximately 9 days to get the data moved around for about 300 employees. Let me know if you have any other questions.

@talkingmoose Hi Bill. Any suggestions or tips in migrating existing 2011 users to 2016. I am in the process of creating a migration plan for my company and make it as automated as possible.

Thank You

@wmateo, great question!

Just returned from PSU MacAdmins this week where I presented Administering Office 2016 for Mac. Once my slides and presenter notes are posted I'll mention it here on JAMF Nation.

A few things:

1. You don't need to remove Office 2011 right away. It and Office 2016 don't share any common files or preferences and will run nicely side-by-side. That's due to changes in the architecture.
2. If you're running Exchange, then Outlook doesn't import the mail, calendar, contact, etc., data from your Mac. Instead, it only imports account settings and then syncs that data from the server.
3. If you remove Office 2011 and then install Office 2016, launching the new applications should migrate user data such as Word's Normal file and similar files to their new locations.

Looks like the slide are up but not the video yet.
http://macadmins.psu.edu/conference/resources/

@talkingmoose any new discoveries with deploying 2016? on the Windows side of the house, moving from 2010 to 365 pro plus, is pretty seamless. Office is removed first, then 365 pro plus deployed. Outlook still finds mail settings, and .ost and imports. I haven't begun testing on the mac side but I was wondering if outlook settings are preserved when removing office 2011. I referenced your above post where you specify it doesn't, but I was wondering if any new progress has been made with the deployment of 2016

@talkingmoose have you experimented with Automating the Import 2011 settings into 2016. I am trying to make the user experience as that of the Windows world since we are in a mixed environment. Your presentation is a great help.

That is the only step im missing as well.

@wmateo and @geoffreykobrien, although Outlook 2011's AppleScript dictionary included a feature to import Entourage identities, Outlook 2016's dictionary doesn't include any account upgrade or import functionality.

While Microsoft will continue supporting the existing AppleScript code in Office for Mac, it has said it will no longer continue development. That means we're more than likely not going to see the necessary commands added to Outlook's dictionary to script upgrading or importing from Outlook 2011.

For now, my only suggestion is good documentation for your users or support folks. :-/