It was the easiest Exchange Server upgrade I have ever witnessed! My transition from BPOS to Office 365 is complete. If this is an indication of how painless the migration will be to future versions of the Office 365 product then I am a lifetime customer.

With just over 24 hours of minimal outage I was impressed with the lack of issues along the way. More importantly the other users on my account only noticed their mobile phone email stopped connecting. Thanks to the auto discover record I was able to guide them through changing the settings very easily using just their username (email address) and password. The iPhone setup for email now has a dedicated Microsoft Exchange option and for a novice user it takes less than 30 seconds to complete the setup.

Within Outlook 2010 I was warned on startup that a change had occurred and Outlook advised me to restart. Once I had then I was able to connect to my new Office 365 mailbox, this is important because I didn’t have to re-sync the mailbox with my PC. My mailbox is sitting at around 2Gb at the moment and downloading that amount of information again would have been a pain.

For the 24 hours of the transition period I was not able to see the administrator portal component of Office 365, I could only see Outlook Web App.

I couldn’t have asked for a better experience! Now I am federated with Lync Online you can add me using nick.bowyer@itprofessional.co.nz .