As customers are upgraded or sign up for the latest version of Office 365, they may notice some changes in their recipient and organization management experience. For instance, we now allow the Organization and Hybrid Migration management experience to be initiated from the Exchange Administration Center in the service. This allows you as the administrator to take advantage of many of the enhancements that were added to the migration and organization management experience. The good news is you can do this without having to upgrade your on-premises Exchange 2010 Hybrid server to Exchange 2013.
Hybrid Mailbox Moves
When in Hybrid with Exchange Online, you should consider using the Exchange Administration Center to perform your hybrid mailbox moves. Some of the main features that have been added or enhanced are listed in this TechNet article:
- Ability to move multiple mailboxes in large batches.
- Email notification during move with reporting.
- Automatic retry and automatic prioritization of moves.
- Option for manual move request finalization, which allows you to review your move before you complete it.
- Periodic incremental syncs to update migration changes.
The other benefit to using the EAC is the ability to have access to the latest enhancements as they are made available. The Migration team is continually working to improve the migration experience and resolve issues that we may face along the way.
The 2010 SP3 Exchange Management Console is still a supported tool for performing Hybrid Mailbox moves, however you would be missing out on the enhancements that were built into the EAC and you could potentially run into some of the limitations that now exist in the EMC when connecting to the new service.
Previous EMC move mailbox experience
Most hybrid customers are currently running Exchange server 2010 in their on-premises environment that are connected to Office 365. Many customers are accustomed to performing their mailbox moves from the Exchange Management Console on-premises. If there was an issue initiating the move, the customer would be notified with an error message such as the following:
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This would let the administrator know that they needed to start investigating the moves. In many cases, when you get a generic error (such as the error above) or if you wanted to get a more verbose error message you would use PowerShell connected to Exchange Online to initiate the move using the following steps:
- Connect PowerShell to Exchange Online
- Then run:
$OnPremAdmin=Get-Credential (supply the on-premises administrator credentials)
New-MoveRequest -Remote -RemoteHostName mail.contoso.com -RemoteCredential $OnPremAdmin -TargetDeliveryDomain “Contoso.mail.onmicrosoft.com”
Current EMC move mailbox experience
With the latest version of Office 365,if you were to use the EMC on-premises to initiate a mailbox move and there was an issue, you would not get ANY errors. Meaning you may think the move was submitted successfully even if it was never even submitted to the Mailbox Replication Service. This could mean no move logs, no moves in the queue, and no record that a move was even attempted. While moves from the EMC are still supported, all of the move features are not available. In other words, you should really use the EAC in the cloud to get the best and most reliable administration experience for your mailbox move management.
What is the process that should be used to perform a Mailbox move?
Here is a quick walkthrough of how to move a mailbox from Exchange 2003/2007/2010/2013 in a hybrid environment with the new service (this is assuming you have your Hybrid environment already configured properly):
1. Log into https://portal.MicrosoftOnline.com with the tenant administrator credentials
2. In the top Ribbon click on the Admin dropdown menu and select Exchange
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3. Then select the Migration option
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4. Then click the + symbol and select the appropriate move operation (for this we will assume you are moving a mailbox to the cloud so we select “Migrate to Exchange Online”)
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5. Select the Remote Move Migration as the migration type for a hybrid mailbox move
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6. Select the mailboxes that you want to move
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7. Provide your on-premises administrator credentials in the domain\user format
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8. Ensure that the on-premises endpoint that has MRSProxy enabled is shown ad the Migration endpoint (this will be the same endpoint regardless of this being an onboard or offboard request)
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9. Then simply give the migration batch a name and initiate the move
EMC Changes
The 2010 Exchange Management Console has three sections which are Organization Configuration, Server Configuration, and Recipient Configuration. These section will be visible to administrators as long as they have permissions (via RBAC) to the objects that are within that container.
Before the Service upgrade, if a customer was in hybrid and connected there on-premises 2010 sp2 EMC to Office 365 they would see two section (Organization Configuration and Recipient Configuration). The Tenant Administrator would not see server configuration settings because they have no control or view into the Server Configuration settings.
After the service upgrade, the customers (using 2010 sp3 EMC) will actually see only one container (Recipient Configuration) in the EMC. The reason we removed the Organization Configuration is because we do not support or test allowing an Exchange 2010 EMC to control or change organizational settings in a newer version of Exchange. To prevent issues we have completely remove that container from view in the EMC. Configuration changes to the tenant’s Exchange organizational settings should be accomplished by connecting to the Exchange Administration Center in Exchange Online.
Before the upgrade:
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After the upgrade:
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