Migrating Microsoft Exchange to a cloud/hosted service

[lwharding]

Dear cloud members, I am in a quandary and wanted some useful input on
what will surely be, in the not too distant future, a very seamless
and straightforward process. How can one seamlessly and intelligently
migrate an in-house Exchange environment to a cloud/hosted based
service?

In short I have facilitated a number of migrations now and each time
we end up with a significant amount of manual intervention. I have
briefly summarised the current process below and would welcome some
thoughts or suggestions on a more effective and streamlined migration
path. Please note cost in when suggesting third-party apps or
services.


1. exmerge data from existing server(s) up to a certain date
2. create accounts on new platform
3. ftp data from existing environment to our data centre
4. import data from step 1 into accounts on hosted platform
5. change MX records
6. export most recent emails from old system locally
7. create the new user profile on local Outlook or Entourage
8. copy over NK2 file, import most recent emails into new profile
9. new profile will then attempt to download all old emails from
hosted platform (which can take an age depending on the available
bandwidth)

Would be great to hear from people that have had a similar experience
as keen to draw up a standard on future migrations.

Thanks for any help, advice or suggestions!!

Kind regards
L