“A clean slate means not moving the junk off your old systems onto your new Microsoft 365 setup. By junk I mean move useless docs from people’s PCs, you also don’t want to migrate your old Active Directory configuration either, but most importantly, don’t buy expensive, complicated “migration tools” from the third-party vendors of the day.”

You want to get your company on Microsoft 365, but you have lots of questions. Like, do you move everything at once? Do you break it down into pieces? Will you do it yourself or get help? And who exactly is going to help? Microsoft? Some third-party vendors you Googled? The company you purchased your 365 subscription from? Are you going to merge your data and emails or start fresh? You may have also begun to question some of the vendors out there since they don’t seem to have solutions aimed at helping small firms migrate to the Microsoft 365 Cloud. I did some research migrating to the cloud and found a company charging $550 PER MONTH for a 10-user license for their full-featured cloud migration tool. I thought that was real confusing , and expensive. While I am thinking – you only need to do the migration once, why do they want to lock you into a monthly subscription?

You’re probably asking yourself:

Our 365 Cloud Migrate is a unique approach helping firms get on Microsoft 365 simply & inexpensively.

First, we’ll get your business subscription setup on Microsoft. With Compliant Workspace everyone in your company gets 1 TB data storage, 50 GB email on Exchange and Teams, oh and we include our 365 Cloud Protect Plug-In that will automatically backup and retain any data you store on the Microsoft Cloud – free. Best of all, we won’t make you pay for fancy complicated migration tools. Essentially our 365 Cloud Migrate will guide you through the steps to get your company fully moved to the Microsoft Cloud.

After we have your Microsoft 365 subscription is ready to go, you’ll begin to move company data. The simplest thing to do first is users’ personal data off their PCs, good thing is, this is simple so you’ll get everyone to do it themselves, and they can do it anytime. So now, once you have signed up with Compliant Workspace, here’s what each person in your company can do themselves as the first step:

1. They will login to their Microsoft 365 account we have setup for them by going to office.com (we will give everyone a user name and password for this).

2. When they’re in office.com, they’ll go to “App Launcher” and Get OneDrive, download it and install it on their PCs

3. A folder will appear on their PC that’s their OneDrive storage on Microsoft 365, and they will simply drag and drop their folders from their PC to this OneDrive folder. (Do this for any other PC’s they have or if they have files on a personal Cloud service like Dropbox).

Next (if you have a file server) you’re going to move any shared data off it to SharePoint. When you sign up with Compliant Workspace we will have a main company SharePoint site ready for this data that will be shared with everyone in the company. Here is how you move data from your in-house server to Microsoft 365 SharePoint:

1. Go here and download the SharePoint Migration tool:
https://spmt.sharepointonline.com/install/default.htm

2. But be sure to install and run the SharePoint Migration tool from the server

3. Connect to your SharePoint, Choose the folders you want to Migrate and run it. The cool thing here is you can do exclusions before you run the SharePoint migration tool so that you’ll exclude garbage from being migrated to your fresh Microsoft 365 tenant. For example, I suggest you create a list of file extension types you DO NOT want to migrate. Also, set the option in the SharePoint tool to move files modified after a specific date. For example, don’t move files that haven’t been modified for 3 yrs.

Alright, we have moved everyone’s personal data off their computers to their individual OneDrive accounts, and you got shared folders off your server onto SharePoint, now let’s tackle the seemingly most complex thing: get peoples email onto your hosted Microsoft 365 Exchange.

I say this is the seemingly most difficult part of your move to Microsoft 365 because if you go ahead and google “how do I move my email to Microsoft 365” you’ll get lots of hits (Google sponsored adds by the way) from third-party vendors selling your their awesome “must-have migration tools” that will automate and take care of the whole move in one fell-swoop. We are going to ignore them. Further down in your search, you’ll see Microsoft selling their tool: the Network Upload Tool you’ll find on one of their portals, we’ll ignore that too.

Finally, and this can be the most difficult part of an email migration to the cloud, when you move email, if you mess up, employees’ emails could stop working if you don’t know what you’re doing, also you might loose everyone’s email.

Nonetheless, our 365 Cloud Migrate takes a cold cut-over approach that’s foolproof, further it doesn’t use expensive third-party “google sponsored” tools, or add-ons, or pay-as-you-go license fees for something you’ll only need once. Here is how we will move you from ANY email system to your hosted Microsoft Exchange accounts we have setup for you. We pick a Friday afternoon, and:

1. With access to your DNS hosting provider, change your MX mail record to redirect your email from your old email provider to your Microsoft 365
2. While this is being done, each person exports their email from out to a PST file (dump this file in their personal OneDrive so its available ready to be switched)
3. Each person goes to their Outlook, removes their old profile adds another one for their Microsoft 365 user
4. Then they import the PST file they exported in step 2 to import everything from their old email account to their new profile in Outlook

Moving from any email system to Microsoft Hosted Exchange done in four steps:

Small firms who have decided they want to move their company to Microsoft 365 need a clean slate, this means they don’t want to move old useless data, nor do they have to transfer their Active Directory configuration to their new Microsoft Tenant, they surely don’t need to purchase complicated migration tools, they need a simple and inexpensive path to get on the cloud.

Our 365 Migration Service is a unique method designed to get small companies on the cloud. We take you through the complete process by creating your Microsoft 365 Subscription ready for all employees with everything needed, we then guide you through the complete move of your data and emails to the cloud.