Alpesh Nakar's Blog

What a pain! (Kind of, till I found out why the pain and how to work around that)

I was using Microsoft BPOS since last couple of months for some of my active domains with limited users and last month, I planned to move them over to Office 365.

Microsoft have a BPOS to Office 365 transition web site, which is pretty useless. Useless since it does not have any tools or guidance that I could use to make a smooth transition. Thankfully I hadn’t started using SharePoint in BPOS, so migrating data from BPOS (SharePoint) to Office 365 (SharePoint) is one less headache to take care of… very glad, given the pain I went through to migrate from BPOS to Office 365 for 3 users mailbox and behind the scenes with DNS, etc.

• Create users on generic domain (*.onmicrosoft.com)
• Add your own domain name to Office 365
• Initiate the verification process (txt method preferred) (At Domain Name Registrar)
• Resolve issue that you cannot have domain in BPOS and Office365 -
  • In BPOS change default domain for all users to generic bpos domain *.microsoftonline.com
  • In BPOS delete the  domain name
  • Call up BPOS / FOPE team(s) to make sure the company domain is deleted
• Login in Office365 portal again and complete the domain verification process
• Add/Edit DNS entries for MX records, SRV Records (At Domain Name Registrar)
  • Note: It does not matter what plan you will be using Small  Business or Enterprise. [In forthcoming post I will explain about DNS and Office 365]
• Edit user properties from generic domain (*.onmicrosoft.com) to your domain

That’s it, you can send and receive your emails with Office 365.

Hold on, what about my emails/calendar/contacts from BPOS?

Leaving any of third-party products out of the equation, this is what I did

• Setup Outlook with your BPOS email account (Using Microsoft Online Services Sign-In application)Export all of the mail data into a .PST file.
• Once you have exported the .PST, configure Outlook to with your Office 365 email address username@companydomain.whatever.
• Import the .PST with the Import Wizard and this will sync all of your data back to Office 365.