In this blog article I will share a useful tip on how to easily measure O365 migration success for your email migration project.  In any O365 email migration there will be at least one major change when a large number of people have been cut-over to Office 365.  Often, these people will be distributed across multiple locations.

O365 Migration Success – Measurement Problem

The problem is that you will be unware if everyone is actively accessing their new mailbox on the Monday morning.  No matter how well the mailbox data migration went, users still need to login into a new Outlook Profile to see their new mailbox.   If they cannot do this, then all they see is failure.  Success is measure from what the user sees on their desktop, not on how many GB of mail has been migrated over a weekend.   You need to be able to measure how many users are successfully using the new Outlook mailbox.

O365 Migration Success – Measurement Solution

Setup a new shared mailbox in O365, called “Migration Tracker”, and give yourself access to it.   From this mailbox, prepare a new mail message on the weekend of the migration, to all the new Office 365 mailboxes.   Use a subject like “Important Email from the migration team – please read”.     In the message options, turn on the Delivery Receipt and the Read Receipt.   Then send the message.

Immediately, you can measure the successful presence of the new Office 365 mailboxes, as the Delivery Receipts will flow in.   Then, more usefully, on the Monday morning, you should see Read Receipts arrive in from users actively in their new Outlook mailbox.   This is not perfect, but gives you a guide to how successful the migration is going.  Better to have this information than none at all.

Conclusion

I have used this method on many email migrations, and been able to reassure the Project Sponsor that even though a couple of people are having issues starting Outlook, the majority are fine – backed up by evidence.  Please read my blog article that covers the different aspects of the Approach to Office 365 Migration, as this article is only one small part.  If you need consulting with your email migration project, and need more advice like this, then please get in touch.