Migrating mail data using the Mail Onboarding Manager

The Mail Onboarding Manager tool migrates your existing on-premises Microsoft Exchange 2010, 2013, and 2016 mail data from your legacy mail system to a Notes® .nsf file. It then moves your mail files to the cloud and provisions new or existing IBM Connections™ Cloud accounts with SmartCloud Notes mail subscriptions.

Note: The current version of the Mail Onboarding Manager supports migration from English language Exchange servers only.

After you install the Mail Onboarding Manager, you can import your user information by using a .csv file. After the user names are imported, the Mail Onboarding Manager will look up other attributes of the imported users, such as user name, from the Exchange Web Service. Alternatively, the tool can import user names and information directly from an on-premises Exchange Active Directory.

You can then step through a simplified process of migrating mail files and assigning subscriptions, while the tool does most of the work for you. The tool is organized into five pages, each of which provides information or capabilities that step you through the onboarding process. You control when and how you migrate the mail data and provision the accounts. You can monitor the onboarding progress on the tool's Dashboard or the Detail view on the Staging page.

Migrated data includes historical mail, contacts, calendar entries and tasks. Once the data is migrated, users can access their mail by using any of the Notes clients including IBM® Verse, SmartCloud Notes web, a locally installed Notes client, or if applicable, IBM Traveler or Verse mobile on a mobile device. Traveler requires a SmartCloud Notes enablement.

Some data cannot be migrated or is not supported in a service-only cloud environment. See Migration limitations.

To use this tool you must have completed your account setup configuration. Some of your organization's account setup configuration settings are used as the tool's account setup defaults.

Important: Consider when the best time is to configure the MX record. You can configure it at any time -- before, after, or during the migration, but each of these decisions impacts your migration differently. See the technote Migration limitations using the Mail Onboarding Manager to migrate mail data from on-premises Microsoft Exchange server to the cloud for a description of how migration is impacted in each of these scenarios.

Note: If you downloaded a hybrid version of the Mail Onboarding Manager tool that you used to transfer on-premises Notes mail files to the cloud, you cannot use that instance of the tool. You must download and install a second instance of the onboarding manager tool and configure it for Exchange migration.

For additional information about the Mail Onboarding Manager see IBM Mail Onboarding Manager Overview and Education on the IBM developerWorks wiki.