3. Is Office 365 E3 the right choice for you?

As seen in the previous section there are quite a few differences between the various Office 365 Enterprise offerings. It’s necessary that you understand the needs of your organization and even individual users.

You can mix freely between the various licensing plans. If e.g. only a small number of users need litigation hold you can limit the number of E3 licenses to those users and assign the rest with the cheaper E1 licenses (if all other aspects of E1 meets their requirements).

If you have socalled Deskless employees you can even go with the Exchange Online Kiosk/Office 365 F1 license for a subset of users with very simple Office 365 needs.

One thing to keep in mind: You can never enable more than one Exchange service per user.

4. Office 365 Implementation

Implementing Office 365 can be a rather complicated affair that should only be taken on if you have a skilled inhouse IT staff. Otherwise look for experienced consultants to assist you with the planning and perhaps execution of the migration project.

To implement Office 365 and migrate your existing users and mailboxes to Office 365 consider these high level steps:

• Create an Azure subscription
• Synchronize local users and groups to Azure using Azure AD Connect
• Connect your local Exchange organization and Office 365
• Migrate mailboxes to Exchange Online/Office 365

There are a lot of sub tasks related to the above high level steps and the specific planning is very much depending on your organization size and chosen migration strategy. For most mid-sized to large organizations you will want to migrate in batches, most likely defined by departments that work closely together.

Make sure to verify the success of each step in details before moving on and start with smaller migration batches to gain some experience without breaking too much.

5. Office 365 Administration

Once you have all mailboxes migrated to Office 365 your list of day to day administration tools will increase. A lot! This comes as a surprise to many admins.

• You still need Active Directory Users & Computers to manage standard user attributes like name, contact information, password, etc.
• You still need a local Exchange Server with Exchange Admin Center to manage the mail related attributes in your local Active Directory, e.g. proxyAddresses, targetAddress, etc.
• Additionally you need the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal (or Azure Portal) to manage Office 365 specific settings, e.g. mail enabling/assigning licenses to users
• Additionally you need the Exchange Online Exchange Admin Center to manage mailbox properties of the users’ Exchange Online mailboxes, e.g. mailbox forwarding, message delivery restrictions, mail forwarding, etc.
• Additionally you need PowerShell to manage some Exchange online attributes which have no GUI, e.g. mailbox quota and warning limits
• Additionally you need the Azure AD Connect administration tool to ensure a continued flawless synchronization between local and online resources

This means you need to understand which tool is needed for what job every time you do user and mailbox management. Delegating access to IT staff also becomes a bit of a challenge since a lot of different resources are being accessed.

To make your life easier you can look for 3rd party tools. One such tool is Easy365Manager which allow you to do all the standard user, mailbox, license and synchronization tasks inside the well-known Active Directory Users and Computers tool, as seen in the following screen shots: