My experience with migrating to BPOS wasn’t the best unfortunately. I’m documenting my experience here for my own recollection as well anyone else who may need help. My migration is from a hosted exchange account from MailStreet. No real complaints with them, but I’m marketing BPOS, so I need to be using it. Plus there are more benefits to using BPOS over just a hosted Exchange service. Granted, I won’t use many of them because of the current size of my company, but that should change over time.
My migration is very small – in fact, it’s just me right now, so I figured it would have to be really simple. Well, one of my first problems was in sending up the csv file – it constantly erred out when I sent it up.
In all my navigation through the help on administration console at the time, I couldn’t find this page which my BPOS contact got from his technical contact. This article helped immensely! There is one thing wrong with the article though. It says Step Three is to determine how to access the hosted exchange server. This is actually done in the second step of the actual migration portion. The portion that is documented in that article the prep work to get the migration going.
Here is the csv format to use as text:
SourceServer,SourceIdentity,SourceLoginID,SourcePassword,TargetIdentity,DisplayName,ClientLocale, MailboxQuotaSize
<server>.<mailhoster>.net,user1@domain.net,user1@domain.net,password,user1@domain.net,User1,,5 GB
<server>.<mailhoster>.net,user2@domain.net,user2@domain.net,password,user2@domain.net,User2,,5 GB
If you have an administrative account on your hosted account (I do, I imagine most others do too), the only fields necessary in the csv file are “SourceServer”, “SourceIdentity” and “TargetIdentity”. The identity fields are the email addresses.
One other issue I ran into was the value for the Source Server. When setting up Outlook previously to work with MailStreet, the server name that was given to me was: mse17be2.mse17.exchange.ms. That never worked. I logged into the administrative console for MailStreet and popped into OWA from there and the server name was: mail.mse17.exchange.ms. Using that name worked. I’m certainly not an Exchange administrator by any means, so maybe that’s normal, I don’t know. In any event, that worked and was another hurdle I had to get over.
Once you have your csv file created, open the migration tool. If you haven’t already downloaded it, it can be found here.
When you first open it up, it’s going to ask you to log into your Microsoft online account. After doing that, you’ll want to click “Add Mailboxes” on the right. This will prompt you to upload the csv file you just created. Now, because my migration is very small, I had already created my user account via the administration page. So when I uploaded the file, here is what I saw:
At this point, click the migrate option on the right. The second step in this wizard is where you choose the access method you will use for the hosted exchange account.
I chose administrative and put in the username (not the full email address) and password.
If you don’t get a value for your mailbox size, my finding is that the wizard will fail. Obviously it hasn’t been able to resolve the mailbox.
DNS change information can be found here and here.
And here are some important URLs to keep.