If you are still operating Exchange Server 2003, then you require to quickly track your Office 365 migration, mainly because Exchange 2003 stopped getting supported by Microsoft in 2014. What’s a lot more, most Exchange Server 2003 systems are running on Windows Server 2003 and this will also no longer be supported by Microsoft just after June 2015. These two events mean your technique will be increasingly open to external hacker attacks as security breaches are no longer becoming fixed by Windows updates.
In addition, unless you have moved your server to a virtual environment sometime over the final few years, it is incredibly most likely that your physical file server is also out of warranty, operating gradually, nearing its disk capacity and starting to suffer reliability challenges.
365 beheer from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 can nevertheless be safely performed, on the other hand there is typically an extra difficulty to be overcome regarding Microsoft Outlook. A lot of organizations that are running Exchange 2003 are also running Workplace 2003. The great news is that moving to Office 365 presents a great opportunity to also replace Workplace 2003 by choosing an Workplace 365 plan that incorporates Office 2013 – for example the Office 365 Business enterprise Premium plan.
The undesirable news is you have a chicken and egg situation simply because Office 2003 in general – and Outlook 2003 in distinct – does not work with Workplace 365. This suggests that in the course of the migration method you have to choose between upgrading your e mail technique initially, and then not getting able to access it till you have updated all the computer systems to a later version of Workplace (at least office 2007). Or, you upgrade all the computers to a newer version of Workplace 1st, and then do the migration of Exchange Server to Workplace 365.
Whichever technique you pick, there will be a period of time when users are stuck in no man’s land – they will not be capable to access their e-mail server from their version of Outlook. So a selection need to have to be created – is it finest to upgrade Workplace initially, or is it most effective to upgrade the e-mail server very first? True planet knowledge shows that it is very best in each predicament to upgrade to Workplace 365 initially and then upgrade Workplace 2003 customers to Workplace 2013. Here’s two hypothetical examples to prove this point:
Business A has 20 staff with 19 customers operating Outlook 2010 on their computers and with only one user operating Outlook 2003. It would be greatest to migrate the email server to Workplace 365 initially, for the reason that only the one user will not be in a position to access the new e mail server till their version of Workplace gets upgraded. And it ought to take only an hour or so to get that user’s laptop or computer upgraded to Office 2013.
Enterprise B also has 20 staff, but in their case 19 users are on Workplace 2003 and only one particular is on say Office 2010. At first glance this seems like a issue – if the Exchange 2003 Server is migrated to Office 365 initial then the 19 staff will not be capable to access their emails till the computers have Workplace 2013 installed. And conversely, if the 19 computer systems are updated to Workplace 2013 1st, they won’t be able to access their emails until the Workplace 365 migration course of action has been completed. Luckily, in this case there is a extremely very good interim option – users can make use of OWA (Outlook Net Access) to access their emails by means of the browser till their computer systems are updated to Office 2013. Certainly, it will also be achievable for them to now have access to Workplace 365 e mail on a range of smartphones and tablets they may perhaps already have like iPhones, iPads, Windows mobile devices and Android devices.
Performing migrations to Workplace 365 from later versions of Exchange are a lot easier to action, but with a effectively-designed scoping strategy that considers the implications of old versions of Workplace, the Exchange 2003 migration procedure can still be performed in a timely and expense-successful fashion.
It might effectively be that the best way to assure your organization of a successful Office 365 migration from Exchange 2003 is to use the solutions of a Microsoft Companion that has Workplace 365 certifications and true-world experience in performing Workplace 365 migrations.