How to Use Minimal Hybrid to Quickly Migrate Exchange Mailboxes to Office 365
Summary: How to quickly migrate Exchange Mailboxes to Office 365 using express migration.
Instructions
Affected Products:
- Office 365 for Business
The minimal hybrid, also known as express migration, is an option in the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard, which may be used to migrate the contents of user mailboxes to Office 365 over a course of a couple of weeks or less.
You can use this option if:
- You are running at least one Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, or Exchange 2016 server on-premises;
- You plan to move to Exchange Online over a course of a few weeks or less;
- You do not plan to continue to run directory synchronization to manage your users.
Procedure
- Sign in to Office 365
with your work or school account.
- Go to the Domains
- On the Domains page, click Add domain to start the domain wizard.
- On the Add a domain page, type in the domain name (for example: Dell.com) you use for your on-premises Exchange organization and then choose Next.
- On the Verify domain page, select either Sign in to GoDaddy (if GoDaddy manages your DNS records) or Add a TXT record instead for any other registrars then click Next.
- Follow the instructions for your DNS hosting provider. The TXT record is chosen to verify ownership usually. You can also find the instructions in Create DNS records for Office 365 when you manage your DNS records
- In the Office 365 domain wizard, click Done > Verify now. A verification page is displayed. Click Finish.
On a computer that is domain-joined to your on-premises organization, sign in to your Office 365 account by using your global admin credentials, and start the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard on the Data migration page of the Office 365 admin page.
- In the Office 365 Admin center, go to Users > Data migration.
- In the Migration page, click Exchange under Select your data service.
- In the first Hybrid Configuration Wizard page, select next and in the On-premises Exchange Server Organization page, accept the default values and choose Next
- In the Credentials page, select Use current Windows credentials for the on-premises Exchange server, and enter admin credentials for it and your Office 365 tenant.
- Click Next, and then choose next again once the connections and credentials are validated.
- In the Hybrid Features page, select Minimal Hybrid Configuration > Next.
- In the Ready for Update page, choose update to prepare the on-premises mailboxes for migration.
To run directory synchronization to create users, follow these steps:
- In the User Provisioning page, click Synchronize my users and passwords one time. You are prompted to download and install the Azure AD Connect wizard to synchronize your users from on-premises to Office 365.
Figure 1: (English Only) Office 365 Hybrid Configuration
- Once Azure AD Connect has been downloaded, run it and choose the default options for Express settings.
- After synchronization is completed, you will be redirected to the Office 365 Data migration page where you can see all your users that were synchronized to Office 365.
- After the one-time synchronization is done, directory synchronization is turned off for your Office 365 tenant.
After Azure AD connect synchronizes your users and their passwords to Office 365, you have to assign Office 365 licenses to them so that they have a cloud mailbox to which to migrate their on-premises mailbox data.
The status on the Data migration page indicates that a license is needed as shown in the figure.
In the Admin center, go to Users > Active users and follow these instructions to assign licenses to your users
After you assign licenses to your users, you can go to the Data migration page to start migrating their mailboxes.
- Go to Users > Data migration, and on the Migration page, choose Exchange for your data service.
- It is recommended that you migrate mailboxes for two or three users as a test before migrating all your users to ensure everything works as expected.
- The Data migration page displays the migration status as it progresses. For a full list, see Migration users status report
Email systems use a DNS record called an MX record to figure out where to deliver email messages. During the email migration process, your MX record was pointing to your on-premises Exchange email system. Now that the email migration to Office 365 is complete, it is time to point your MX record at Office 365. You must finish setting up your DNS records also.
In the Office 365 Admin center, go to Settings > Domains and then choose the domain name you want to update, for example, contoso.com. The domains wizard guides you through the update steps. See this article for instructions specific to your registrar or host: How to Add MX Record to Route Email in Office 365.