If you are still running Exchange Server 2003, then you have to have to speedy track your Office 365 migration, due to the fact Exchange 2003 stopped being supported by Microsoft in 2014. What’s microsoft 365 business , most Exchange Server 2003 systems are running on Windows Server 2003 and this will also no longer be supported by Microsoft after June 2015. These two events mean your technique will be increasingly open to external hacker attacks as security breaches are no longer getting fixed by Windows updates.
In addition, unless you have moved your server to a virtual atmosphere sometime over the final handful of years, it is quite likely that your physical file server is also out of warranty, running gradually, nearing its disk capacity and beginning to endure reliability problems.
Migration from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 can still be safely performed, having said that there is usually an additional issue to be overcome concerning Microsoft Outlook. A lot of organizations that are running Exchange 2003 are also operating Workplace 2003. The superior news is that moving to Workplace 365 presents a fantastic chance to also replace Office 2003 by picking an Workplace 365 program that involves Workplace 2013 – for example the Office 365 Business Premium strategy.
The undesirable news is you have a chicken and egg circumstance for the reason that Office 2003 in common – and Outlook 2003 in particular – does not operate with Workplace 365. This indicates that throughout the migration course of action you have to make a decision among upgrading your e-mail program very first, and then not getting capable to access it till you have updated all the computers to a later version of Workplace (at least workplace 2007). Or, you upgrade all the computers to a newer version of Office first, and then do the migration of Exchange Server to Workplace 365.
Whichever method you pick out, there will be a period of time when customers are stuck in no man’s land – they won’t be able to access their e mail server from their version of Outlook. So a decision want to be produced – is it finest to upgrade Workplace very first, or is it ideal to upgrade the e mail server very first? Genuine planet practical experience shows that it is best in every single predicament to upgrade to Office 365 initial and then upgrade Office 2003 users to Workplace 2013. Here’s two hypothetical examples to prove this point:
Business A has 20 employees with 19 customers operating Outlook 2010 on their computer systems and with only one user running Outlook 2003. It would be most effective to migrate the email server to Workplace 365 first, simply because only the a single user won’t be able to access the new email server till their version of Office gets upgraded. And it must take only an hour or so to get that user’s computer upgraded to Workplace 2013.
Organization B also has 20 staff, but in their case 19 users are on Office 2003 and only 1 is on say Workplace 2010. At initial glance this appears like a dilemma – if the Exchange 2003 Server is migrated to Workplace 365 initially then the 19 staff will not be able to access their emails till the computer systems have Workplace 2013 installed. And conversely, if the 19 computer systems are updated to Workplace 2013 1st, they will not be capable to access their emails until the Office 365 migration procedure has been completed. Thankfully, in this case there is a extremely great interim option – customers can make use of OWA (Outlook Internet Access) to access their emails via the browser till their computers are updated to Office 2013. Indeed, it will also be probable for them to now have access to Office 365 e-mail on a variety of smartphones and tablets they may well currently have like iPhones, iPads, Windows mobile devices and Android devices.
Performing migrations to Office 365 from later versions of Exchange are a lot simpler to action, but with a effectively-created scoping plan that considers the implications of old versions of Workplace, the Exchange 2003 migration approach can nevertheless be performed in a timely and expense-productive fashion.
It may well be that the best way to assure your organization of a prosperous Office 365 migration from Exchange 2003 is to use the solutions of a Microsoft Partner that has Workplace 365 certifications and genuine-world expertise in performing Workplace 365 migrations.