Moving mailboxes to/from Exchange Online using the EAC

One of the advantages with deploying Exchange Online in a hybrid configuration (i.e. Exchange on-premises and Office 365 Exchange Online in the cloud) is that you can easily move mailboxes back and forth.

It can be done with PowerShell but one of the straightforward methods is from the Exchange Admin Center (EAC), where there’s an option (to the bottom right of the mailbox panel, under recipients in the Enterprise tab) to move a mailbox to Exchange Online, or to another database (locally), with most of the settings pre-populated for you (like the target mail domain or tenantname.mail.onmicrosoft.com).

Moving back requires a slightly different process though and needs to be performed from the migration panel in the Office 365 tab of EAC.

You’ll also need to know the name of the database you want to move the mailbox to on-premises, and the mail domain name.

One of the challenges I found with moving mailboxes to/from Exchange Online using the EAC was that I sometimes see a migration batch marked as “Completed” but with 0 of 0 synced, 0 of 0 finalized, 0 failed.  This seems to happen if a previous mailbox move had failed; deleting the failed migration batch before re-attempting seems to allow the mailbox move to run successfully.

[This is an edited version of a post that was originally published at markwilson.it]

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