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EHA Transition for Existing Office 365 Exchange Online Customers

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The following information describes things you should know and what to expect if you have an existing fully hosted Office 365 Exchange Online tenant. Fully hosted means you host all mailboxes within Exchange Online.

Before Transition

This information describes actions you should take before your transition begins.

Update Your Company Contacts in the FOPE/EHA Admin Center

Microsoft will send a notice approximately thirty days in advance of the beginning of your scheduled transition. Please identify one person at your company that will act as the Transition Contact. This Transition Contact will be the person that Microsoft will primarily communicate with. To indicate this person you can add the words Transition Contact in the Title field of an existing or new contact. To do this log in to the FOPE/EHA Admin Center and navigate to the Administration tab, Company sub-tab, then click Add to create a new contact, or Edit to update an existing contact.

If there is no Transition Contact defined, all Compliance Managers and Company Contacts listed in the FOPE/EHA Admin Center will receive notifications about your EHA Transition.

Review Un-provisioned EHA Users

Only provisioned users, meaning those listed in the FOPE/EHA Admin Center, will have their messages migrated. You have an opportunity to provision users before the transition. For more information visit the Un-provisioned Users page. For more information about all messaging data that will not be migrated please visit EHA Data That Will Not Migrate to the Office 365 Archive.

Signup for Training
**
**Sign up for EHA Transition training. The EHA Support team offers live training sessions. To attend please RSVP by e-mail to ehasup@microsoft.com, choosing one of the following weekly sessions.

  • Monday at 8:00 AM PST/PDT
  • Wednesday at 1:00 PM PST/PDT
  • Thursday at 6:30 AM PST/PDT
  • Friday at 8:00 AM PST/PDT.  

Note: sessions with no confirmed RSVP’s are cancelled.

Actions Performed by Microsoft in Preparation for your Transition

There are several steps that must be completed before the archive data can be transitioned from EHA.  This includes creating users, assigning licenses, and establishing litigation hold with and without duration. Below you will find a list of actions that will be performed on your behalf.

-         Apply the Exchange Online Plan 2 subscription: Transitioning from EHA to Office 365 requires enabling the Advanced Archiving features of Exchange Online Plan 2 (EP2). For more information about licensing for transitioned EHA customers please read the Understanding your Licensing Options page.  

-         Create users that do not already exist in Office 365: If you have users in EHA that do not already exist in Office 365, Microsoft will create and license new Office 365 users to which EHA messages will be migrated. If an Office 365 user already exists Microsoft will migrate EHA messages to the existing Office 365 user’s Archive folders.  

-         Apply Litigation Hold: Microsoft will enable Litigation Hold with Duration that matches EHA’s Retention Period and Legal Hold settings. The EHA and Office 365 services have important distinctions between message retention terminology and configuration. Please read the information found on the Message Retention and Legal/Litigation Hold page for more information.  

NOTE: Only Office 365 users that were also EHA users will have mail data migrated from EHA and will have their Office 365 Litigation Hold settings modified to match EHA’s retention period and legal hold settings.

During Transition

This information describes user experience you should be aware of and actions you should consider during the transition.

Users will see New Archive Folders

If users already have Office 365 archive folders, then nothing will change in their folder list. Users who do not have Office 365 archive folders will have archive folders enabled during the transition. While messages are copying  from EHA to Office 365 all users will see migrated messages appearing in their archive folder’s inbox. Note that if no data is migrated from EHA to an Office 365 mailbox, then no archive folders are created, and the Office 365 mailbox is untouched by the transition.

Duplicate Messages in the Archive Folders

Note that users may see duplicate messages in their Office 365 archive folders. Messages that are migrated from EHA to Office 365 are placed in the archive mailbox folders. These messages are not inserted into the user’s primary inbox. Also, as archive retention policies automatically move, and users manually move, messages to their archive folders these will become duplicates of the messages copied from EHA. This is expected and normal behavior and will persist until these transition-era messages are deleted based on your long term retention and litigation hold settings.

EHA may Create New Users in Office 365

There may be EHA users that exist only in EHA and do not exist in your Office 365 user list, for example EHA users that are no longer employed at your company. These EHA users will be created in Office 365 and their EHA data will be migrated. These transitioned users will appear in your company Address Book (Global Address List/GAL).  After the transition if you prefer that these new users not be shown in the GAL you can use PowerShell to hide them using the instructions how to Hide a User from the Shared Address Book in Office 365.

Review your Office 365 Retention Policies

You should review your Office 365 retention policies to make sure they are configured as desired. For example if you were transitioned from Microsoft BPOS to Office 365 a default delete policy after one year was applied to your transitioned mailboxes. Now that your Exchange Online mailboxes have Archive folders it is recommended that your retention policies be updated to move messages to the Archive folders rather than delete them.

Litigation Hold vs. Retention Policies

During the transition Microsoft will configure Litigation Hold with Duration on each Office 365 mailbox based on the retention period set in EHA. For example if all of your EHA users were configured to retain messages for 2555 days, then each Office 365 mailbox will have Litigation Hold with a duration of 2555 days configured. If an EHA users has legal hold enabled then the Office 365 mailbox will have Litigation Hold without a duration set, meaning save permanently until litigation hold is turned off.

NOTE: Office 365 retention policies are used to control and reduce the size of a mailbox. In contrast Office 365 litigation hold prevents deletion and is most similar to EHA’s retention period. Please read the information found on the Message Retention and Legal/Litigation Hold page for more information.

The following information describes actions Microsoft performs during  your transition.

Transition Accounts and Settings

Approximately ten days before your transition begins Microsoft will notify you that the EHA Archive will soon be placed into a read only state. From this time forward no further changes to the configuration of EHA will be possible and all changes relevant to archiving should be made in Office 365. Microsoft will disable the EHA journal rule in Office 365 that sends mail to the EHA copy address (journaling rules are located in the Office 365 Microsoft Online Portal under the Exchange section, under Manage, Mail Control, Journaling). From this point in time new e-mail will be ingested in Office 365 only and will no longer be ingested into EHA.

Transition/Copy EHA Messages

Microsoft will next move EHA messaging data over the next several days and users will notice this data arriving in their Office 365 archive folders. The EHA Viewer, as well as the FOPE/EHA Admin Center and EHA Reports services will remain available until approximately fifteen days after you are notified that the transition is complete.

Transition Completes

You will receive a notice informing you when your transition has completed. For approximately fifteen days you will continue to have access to EHA before it is permanently deleted. 

Post Transition

This information describes actions you should take after the completion of your transition.

Consider Exporting EHA Reports within 15 Days after Transition Begins

After transition begins you should log on to the EHA Reports page and export reports that you want to retain for posterity when there is no further access to EHA . For example the Privileged Roles reports are useful for configuring Office 365 with similar administrative permissions that existed in EHA. If you used the supervisor/subordinate review functionality you may wish to export historical Supervisory Review Evidentiary and Message Review Recap reports. To see a description of all the available EHA reports visit the EHA Reports Description page.

In addition Microsoft will include EHA specific configuration information from the FOPE/EHA Admin Center on the USB media that is returned to you with your EHA data. These will be CSV spreadsheets and will include the following information about the configuration of your EHA service:

  • Configuration of the Company tab.
  • Dictionary key word lists.
  • Configuration of each domain under the Domains tab.
  • Configuration of Supervisor/Subordinate relationships.
  • Dictionaries key words used in Supervisor/Subordinate relationships.
  • Configuration of each user under the Users tab.
  • Secondary addresses of each user.
  • A list of your company domain e-mail addresses found in your messaging data for which no user was configured in the FOPE/EHA Admin center at the time of transition.

Configure permissions and roles on your Office 365 accounts

EHA Administrative permissions and Archive Roles do not transition from EHA to Office 365. The Privileged Roles report, which shows the archive roles assigned to each EHA account; and the Employee Roster report, which shows supervisory relationships between EHA users; can be used to configure similar permissions and groups in Office 365.

All EHA Data will be Returned to you on USB Media

Some types of messaging data cannot be migrated from EHA to Office 365. For more information visit the EHA Data That Will Not Migrate to Office 365 page. A full complimentary copy of your EHA will be encrypted to USB media and sent to the Transition Contact that you listed in the FOPE/EHA Admin Center.