Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Office 365 successes and failures

I have been working through the challenges of a staged migration to Office 365. It has been quite the experience.

Testing went pretty good. All the users in the pilot we moved 1 or 2 at a time with some pretty lengthy moves. No surprise as I had been warned. So I began calculating the time to migrate the users and realize this is no 2 week project for sure.

I hope somewhere in these next few posts I can describe or help someone else who faces the same challenges. I know for me, the move to this solution is still a great fit but it has been more challenging than expected.

So much of the process is scripted, that if there is a hiccup you aren't sure what it changed all the time.

Some gotchas... not in order of significance. More as I think of them.
  1. legacyExchangeDN - make sure you get them all right. Any errors create havoc in the organization. Copy the legacyExchangeDN into an x500 address and you should be fine.
  2. Number of items seem to be more important than the size of the mailbox - so far.
  3. Randomly, the mailboxes in a batch fail to move because it couldn't move 1 item in the 5 hour window. So you restart the batch. Then you get impatient and delete the batch and create a new batch. After a few times, it seems like restarting the batch is fine.
  4. The detailed information on a mailbox in the batch stops accumulating time. There are 4 primary areas that it shows in the details (listed below). I had several mailboxes do this. So far, after spending 10-12 hours at a time trying to find the problem, patience pays off. Though it should have went in the 8 hours that the status was syncing and nothing was happening, it seems the only remedy is to try again and let it time out. Try again and let it time out. I even went so far as to archive a users mail up to the current day. When I ran the batch that night, they had less than 5 meg of email. Still took them 5 hours before it started moving them. This of course is in the same batch with other users whose mailboxes all moved in 2 hours totaling about 75K mailbox items (just estimating).
    1. Queued duration: Got to a point and stalled
    2. In-progress duration: was blank for a long time.
    3. synced duration:
    4. Stalled duration: would accumulate about 5 minutes of time and stall
  5. More to come