DIY Office 365 migration faces certain outage

Microsoft has warned eager Office 365 customers and partners that migrating data off Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) themselves could result in email account outages longer than 24 hours.

BPOS was a suite of hosted services including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications and Live Meeting, that had been superseded by the newer hosted suite Office 365.

Microsoft said it had received “a number” of support calls from concerned customers that had attempted to migrate from BPOS to Office 365 themselves only to find that inbound email was knocked out.

“Please be aware that if you attempt a manual migration, emails sent to your domains will be returned to sender as undeliverable until Support can delete your domain from BPOS and you can re-create in Office 365,” Microsoft’s Online blogger Michael O’Neill explained on Sunday.

To avoid the outage customers should avoid setting up Office 365 without first scheduling a transfer of domains with Microsoft Support. 

Microsoft announced Office 365 in June as the replacement for Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in June. Australian customers were expected to be offered a transition at some stage in the 12 months. 

Anyone that was not already an expert in Exchange server migrations should wait “just a couple of months” for Microsoft to transition its US tenants, said O’Neill. 

A potential bottleneck exists with Microsoft Support, which must delete BPOS domains before firing a new one up under Office 365.

Customers also need to have had their production domain removed from Microsoft's anti-spam product, Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE), and this process would result in an extended outage.

“This email outage could last as long as 24 hours (possibly longer if many customers are asking Support to delete their domains at the same time as you),” said O’Neill.

Although there were workarounds to the FOPE delay, Microsoft did not recommend them.