DMC addressed some unique technical challenges:

• The project had timeline restrictions as it needed to be finished in 2 weeks.
• Domains needed to be merged.
• Identities needed to be merged into an existing Office 365 tenant.
• Large number of shared mailboxes and resource rooms.

To address these challenges, DMC worked nights and weekends to complete the project ahead of schedule. DMC received authorization to begin work on a Thursday and began work immediately that day. All mail over 90 days old was moved to Office 365 the first weekend and the remaining emails was moved during the week of cutover. An expedited planning phase allowed DMC to meet this aggressive timeline. 

In order to merge the domains, DMC had to set up a two-way AD trust between the 2 networks so that they could talk to each other. DMC took advantage of the efficiency of BitTitan’s MigrationWiz product to hasten the migration of data to the cloud. This also included the migration of distribution groups, contacts, and resource mailboxes.

To ensure a smooth migration from Exchange 2010 on-premise to the cloud, DMC authored PowerShell scripts to set required values to synchronize mailboxes to their Office 365 tenant. DMC also helped set up an IIS Virtual SMTP server that was used as a relay server for internal scanners to send email via O365.

DMC utilized BitTitan’s DeploymentPro to auto-create an Outlook profile for each end user. The beauty of DeploymentPro is that it takes the current Outlook profile and moves it to a secondary profile. Then the new O365 profile becomes the default profile. This is something that you cannot do very easily manually and in this case, it did it automatically 160+ times. Azure Active Directory Sync was used to sync users from the on-premise Active Directory to Office 365.  

An Active Directory Sync was already set up to sync Winsight’s domain, so DMC was able to add the second domain for Technomic to the existing AD Sync. Also after the Technomic domain was verified in Office 365, the Technomic DNS did not resolve properly for Winsight users attempting to send email to the newly-added Technomic domain. Because Technomic’s domain was used internally already by Winsight, DMC had to change the domain type in O365 from ‘Authoritatiive’ to ‘Internal Relay’. We also had to setup a special temporary connector rule that allowed email to be sent by Winsight employees. The reason behind this is when any domain is set to Authoritative, the Exchange server to which it is associated with tries to find the user inside its organization and if the user is not there it will generate a Non-Deliverable Report stating “User not found”. However, if the domain is set to internal relay it first tries to find the user internally and if it is unable to find the user, it contacts public DNS using the MX record.

Another challenge the project faced soon after cutover was that their bulk email service was generating emails that were being classified as SPAM. DMC was able to successfully add a SPAM filter rule for this service to solve the problem. 

Eight days after beginning work, DMC had a happy customer working in O365.

Learn more about DMC's Microsoft Consulting Services.