I'm wrapping up the transition of email accounts to Microsoft 365 for a large company, and I'm confused about the best way to handle our old on-premises Exchange server. Ideally, I want to get rid of it completely. If I simply power down the server, what steps are necessary to add new users to our domain and ensure their email proxy information is set up correctly? I've come across various methods, like creating users locally, using PowerShell commands, or utilizing some GitHub utilities, but the information spans from nearly a decade old to relatively recent, and it's all mixed with contradictory advice. I'm currently using Exchange 2016 and really want to avoid any complicated migration to a new server just to maintain ties with Active Directory and Exchange Online. What has been your experience with this? What are the best practices I should follow to move forward? Thanks a lot in advance! 🙂
1 Answer
From my experience, you can definitely run without your old Exchange server. Back in 2014, I had to migrate everyone to Office 365 after losing my Exchange server in a failure. When I create users in Active Directory (AD), I simply fill in the proxy address with something like `SMTP:[email protected]`. Once Entra sync does its thing, I just assign the license, and they're set to go.
So, it's just the proxy address that's important? I thought I might have to do more with manually creating mailboxes. Sounds easy enough, I’ll try that after I finish migrating a couple of users!