Hosted Exchange to Microsoft Exchange

This article describes how you can move a Hosted exchange email service to Microsoft Exchange.

Firstly, Hosted Exchange is NOT Microsoft Exchange – for example, there is no client tenant so some of the mail moving tools will not work. Once an clients MX records change, access to the old mailboxes is terminated and email can only be retrieved from a backup so, please make sure you have an offline backup of all the clients email accounts. If you need access to email which you have not copied to the new service, we are charged £170 per email address by our Exchange Server provider.

One of the advantages of using a Hosted Exchange server is that our clients can roll on and off with 30 days notice so there are no long term commitments. So if a client needs to move to Microsoft Exchange, there would only be a 30 day rollover – i.e. 1 months payment.

When we re-grade a clients email from Hosted Exchange to Microsoft Exchange, we will need to change the MX records, autodetect, CNAME, SPF and any others specified by the new provider. We will take care of backups and ensure the transfer is carried out well out of working hours to minimize the chances of loosing email. We will also let the client know when the transfer is to complete. We use our remote access program to remotely change the settings on our clients computers, configure the mail client and start the data download.

Our preferred transfer technique is;

• Agree a time and date to carry out the re-grade. Clients are advised how long the procedure may take – considering the total volume of email and the speed of their internet connection.
• Create the record sheet of all the email address, passwords, forwards, aliases etc.
• Draw up the clients Whitelist and Blacklist – if any.
• Send a email to all clients to advise them on the procedures and point out where they can get support setting up Outlook, their phones and webmail.
• Set up each email address in their own profile on a PC in our workshop to be used as a backup.
• Email is downloaded to our mail PC set to run continuously to capture all email for all email addresses sent to the client.
• Create all the new email addresses on Microsoft Exchange.
• At the agreed time and date, we 1, carry out backup of all of the clients email and export it to .PST so that if need be, it can be recovered at a later date. If we have access to our clients computers, we will carry out a backup of their data on them as well. We (or the domain hosting company) then update the MX records and other DNS records to match the specific Microsoft Exchange server.
• The new email accounts are set up with a new profile within Outlook on the clients computer and the data manually restored either form the .PST on each of the clients computers or from our own internal backup.
• Each computer is checked manually to ensure the backed up email is being restored correctly.

External transfer

If the email is being transferred form Hosted Exchange to Microsoft Exchange by a company other than us, they will be responsible for backing up the clients data and transferring it to Microsoft Exchange.

We will submit the full list of email address and passwords needed to get access to the clients email. Note that for obvious reasons, we will not send a list of emails and their passwords in the same message. We will, however, send the list of email accounts by email and passwords by TXT or WhatsApp to the new provider.