As seen from Microsoft, it is straightforward: you need to use native procedures to migrate from a local On-Premises server to Microsoft 365 almost automatically.
As often with Microsoft and cloud migration, the reality is quite different.
Openteam is a French IT Service company – ESN/ SSII (Société de services informatiques) created in 2008. Openteam has specialized in IT managed services, especially for small and medium companies, either on-premises or in the cloud. Their customer recognizes them for their commitment to excellence.
Proactivity and availability are part of Openteam’s core values, which involves high customer satisfaction and low support solicitation.
Openteam has worked for nearly 14 years with Microsoft and recently looked for a robust and manageable solution to migrate a server that was no longer officially supported.
Among the lessons, according to Tristan LABAUME Openteam’s director: despite all its advantages, Microsoft 365 induces a loss of control since separate components are updated at Microsoft’s timing. This will be useful and relevant in many cases, but sometimes it might require undesirable and mandatory changes.
Yet, we will not escape some technical constraints that will reveal incompatibilities with previous components installed locally, such as Azure Active Directory Connect, and therefore updates decided unilaterally by Microsoft.
Migration remains an operation that requires a lot of attention, especially in tracing all the parameters that will not be migrated, such as rights on calendars or incompatibility with recurring events.
On the end-customer side, mailboxes are not all up-to-date and configured according to all the parameters (X500 addresses, for example). Consequently, the verification/modification task and the deactivation of the old Exchange server can only be manual.
MSPs (IT Managed Services Providers) continue to base their approach on third-party tools such as Cloudiway.
According to Tristan LABAUME, CEO of Openteam, “Thanks to Cloudiway SaaS, we were able to bring our client into the 21st century with a smooth and seamless transition for users. It would be impossible to achieve a reliable and transparent migration without a platform like Cloudiway”.
The project took almost two months, and Tristan confirmed that there has been no service interruption, no data loss, or any issues with migrating specific items such as delegations and permissions.
He also noticed the syncing of email data multiple times without any side effects (duplicate, packet loss, etc.)
The whole process of migration needs plenty of time and effort, and it may also involve a few steps which have not been listed. This is why you need a third-party tool and a consultant to follow your project from start to finish.
Exchange Online offers many features and benefits not available with On-Premises services.
Exchange is still one of the most successful source servers, and they are several methods you can use to get your company from Exchange On-Premises to Microsoft 365:
Migrating Exchange On-Premises to Exchange Online or Office 365 offers all the benefits of cloud-based email with robust features and security deployment.
Our consultant team helps you define the best migration strategy and ensure you can meet your deadlines.
Wait no more, ask our experts for an introduction demo to our new platform!
“We have been working with Microsoft 365 for more than 10 years. We have needed to perform Cloud-to-Cloud migrations on many occasions. Cloudiway has always been the perfect partner providing a very valuable product and support”
Víctor M. Salanova
Dirección en Centria Tecnología
“All was achieved 24h after the start, 1st time in my career after more than 10 years of migration. Cloudiway takes care of everything, Mail/shared mailboxes/Ressources/Teams/OneDrive, etc. You need one hour of consulting services to be sure everything is well set up before starting, but in a migration budget, this hour is nothing regarding the time you earn after in support issues…”
Didier Delens
IT Manager at EyeD Pharma
“The Cloudiway Expert was fantastic to work with, very knowledgeable and helpful”
Conrad Murray
Director and Messaging Architect at Nero Blanco
“Microsoft Teams usage continues to grow worldwide, and migration between different teams or from different collaboration systems can be a requirement. With years of experience and a new interface, Cloudiway offers a solution to MSPs and IT Professionals.”
Mike Ammerlaan
Director of Microsoft 365 Ecosystem marketing at Microsoft Corp
“The choice of the Cloudiway solution was a guarantee of success given the experience acquired over many years and the need to migrate Teams that only Cloudiway was able to offer on the market at the time.
Experience has shown that Cloudiway is the ideal partner.”
Olivier Mithouard
Project Director
“Cloudiway has been exceptionally helpful throughout our implementation.
During the first day of our corporate partnership, they have been responsive and tireless in getting to the bottom of some teething issues.”
Peter Stephens
IT Infrastructure Team Leader
“Migration has been a non-event for IPSEN employees which was saluted by the governance! The transition was seamless and with complete availability of the messaging system and without any disruption for IPSEN users.”
Mickaël Corniaux
Head of IT IPSEN
“Cloudiway allowed us to save considerable time during our Office 365 migration. The solution is fully automated to make work processes easier. The smooth migration process delivered real benefits for our business goals.”
Evan Bradley
IT Project Leader
“The migration and the platform was really helpful. We completed it in time without errors.”
Adewale Adeleye
Senior Infrastructure Architect Fidelity Bank
“Cloudiway solution was an important key to our success during the acquisition process. We migrated more than 1700 users from Gmail to O365 at lightning speed. Cloudiway is also a great partner when it comes to performance and support…”
Bill Callas
IT Project Manager
“Cloudiway solves an important business problem for us by allowing Office 365 users to effectively work with and schedule meetings with Google users in our subsidiary company. It’s invisible to the end-user, but the benefits have greatly reduced the back-and-forth communication necessary for collaboration and enabled better business results.”
Kevin Jordan
Director of IT, Acxiom
“The Cloudiway tool was very valuable in assisting us during our transition from our parent company to our own totally new tenant. Most of our users thought we simply changed their email address in the background – I couldn’t have asked for a better solution.”
Philip Weeks
Senior Infrastructure Architect CMD Group
“It’s very hard to explain just how successful the migration project is currently. Particularly when you consider the scale, data size, time constraints.”
Declan Fanning
Head of IT GAA
