Upgrading to Office 2016 & Large Mail Databases

[avail]

Hi all, just looking for some of your experiences with upgrading from Office 2011 to 2016. Specifically if your users have large mail databases (ours have gotten out of hand, 10GB+ is the norm).

We’ve found that it takes about 1 hour for Outlook 2016 to import each 10GB of mail.

Anyone else have this issue, and how did you approach doing the upgrades? Were they scheduled when someone’s Mac was free, or was it just a case of let the users open Outlook, kick off the import and use webmail for however long it takes?

I've setup a policy that happily uninstalls Office 2011 (leaving mail data in place), installs Office 2016, applies the volume license, installs the latest updates, and adds the apps to all users' docks using dockutil. So on that side of things we are ok. Just wondering best approach for doing the actual roll out!

Thanks!

[davidacland]

In most cases we add the mail account to Outlook 2016 as if it were brand new. All the email is stored on the mail servers in this scenario though as Office365 allows up to 50GB mailboxes.

We do direct people to webmail while data is moving around though.

The other activity we go through (were needed) is archiving a lot of the mail. Where possible we use the Office365 in-place archive and set a rule to archive emails over a certain age. They are still available in Outlook 2016, but just don't download to the computer automatically.