Final Update: Exchange Migration
We wanted to offer one final update before we close the ExchangeDefender NOC covering our Exchange migration.
The past few days have been largely consumed with cleanup and misc configuration requests already covered here. By far the biggest issue has been reseeding and legacy copies of mailboxes exceeding 25GB – using nearly all internal, Microsoft/powershell, and third party tools there seems to be no predictable, foolproof, failsafe way to migrate a mailbox. The larger mailbox gets, the more difficult it seems to port (one particular user has been waiting on their mail for 2 weeks – they have a 70 GB mailbox – and it’s taken dozens of attempts of repair/recheck/export/move/seed/verify) and it has been the greatest source of frustration for us and for our clients, largely because the progress indicators are unreliable and process very prone to failure the larger the mailbox gets. This is why when we started offering 2016 years ago we set up the 50GB quota with 15GB realtime and 35GB in place archive setup so we can deliver on both service restoration and disaster recovery.
We are continuing to assist our partners in the following areas:
– Outlook connectivity (if it keeps on prompting you for a password you need autodiscoverregistryhacks.zip)
– Distribution Group (External) and External Forwards UI (we discovered a bug, the control panel will be back over the weekend and in meantime we’ll create it for you manually with a ticket request)
– Cancelled services (as of yesterday 6/18 we have the ability to remove organizations from ExchangeDefender/O365, so if you client cancelled or went to another service even within O365, open a ticket and request that we delete the org. You can do so on your own as well if you’ve deleted all the mailboxes/forwards/groups.)
– IoT/SMTP (while Exchange/O365 does support SMTP connectivity, managing it through our IoT connector is far more secure and reliable)
– Implementation of Shared Mailboxes. Please, please, please, please DO NOT use Public Folders anymore, for any purpose. Create a Shared Mailbox instead.
At this point everyone can connect, mail delivery and legacy reseeding are in progress, all systems for Exchange, ExchangeDefender, and LiveArchive are working normally.
We’re looking forward to closing this ugly chapter. We have done everything in our power, and we couldn’t be more thankful for our partners who have helped us with the cleanup of the Microsoft disaster. Thank you. We are sorry that so many clients were inconvenienced with this, we planned and managed every step of this migration by the book with thousands of other successful migrations that happened from 2016 – Aug 2019, but when your vendor pulls the rug underneath you and damages hundreds of mailboxes unannounced… many of us will soon be enjoying the first day off in June. The only good news is, you will not have to go through this process again.