We recently completed a project for a small healthcare business with around 20 users, moving their email accounts, website, DNS, MX records from Yahoo Small Business to Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Here are some highlights from the project:
- Yahoo platform is quite archaic. Simple SMTP and IMAP / POP access. Very little to no audit trails. For a healthcare business that aspires to be HIPAA-compliant, this is a very difficult platform to manage.
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium was the perfect fit.
- Modern end user applications – full desktop and mobile versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint and more (Publisher, etc).
- HIPAA BAA (Business Associates Agreement) supported by Microsoft, allowing the small business to store data with an approved entity.
- Office 365 Admin Portal allows granular user management.
- Powered by Azure: Admin portal, Azure Active Directory, MFA, Windows Hello. Very powerful, nearly turnkey setup.
- Security and compliance are top notch. Dedicated compliance portals where we were able to setup relevant data protection policies, audit trails, etc. Endpoint manager (formerly Intune) to enroll and manage desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.
- There are two main ways of migrating end user emails from Yahoo to O365. Both ways require using PST files.
- With a 3rd party software that connects to Yahoo and uploads to the user’s O365 Outlook account.
- With Outlook directly, downloading PST then importing into the user’s profile.
- Doing this for a fully remote workforce proved to be a little challenging. Because the business was upgrading all their laptops, we took the opportunity to setup their Outlook with their Yahoo PST. This required getting each user’s Yahoo application key (not password).
- The process was largely painless, except for a few quirky issues.
- Contacts and calendars cannot be imported as PST; they require special handling as CSV files.
- Some users reportedly missed emails. Most of the time, this is because Outlook does something quirky by having an IMAP “filter” turned on with subfolders. When the filter is on, we learned the hard way that Outlook does not sync up to OWA. Therefore, the email doesn’t show up anywhere. The fix here is to uncheck the filter in Outlook.
- Other minor hurdles were encountered along the way, much like typical IT projects. 80-20 rule applies here – 80% of the time was spent on 20% of the issues.
We completed the project successfully and learned some useful lessons from it. If your business has a similar need, please feel free to contact us for help or advice. We’d be happy to help.