How to switch from GoDaddy to Office 365?

To migrate from GoDaddy to Office 365 tenant, you shall need the following information:

Access to your Office 365 administrator account
Access to your GoDaddy administrator account
Login credentials of all users’ mailboxes that are to be migrated

Step 1: Export users’ mailbox data from GoDaddy email
You need to export the login data of the mailboxes that you wish to migrate from GoDaddy to Office 365. You will need to have access to their mailboxes to complete migration from GoDaddy to Office 365. Your CSV file is now ready with the requisite information.

Step 2: Set up your Microsoft Office 365 account
In this step, it is assumed that you do NOT have a purchased domain that has been configured to work with your Microsoft Office 365, nor do you have a tenancy for Office 365.

The emails created and the users’ profiles are now in the Office 365 system. Before the migration begins, it is a good idea to create a store of the contacts and calendar information because the IMAP migration that is going to be performed from GoDaddy to Office 365 does not migrate those. Hence, a local copy of the data should be created and saved on your system.

Step 3: Create a Local Copy of Contacts and Calendar
To create a local copy of contacts and calendar, please follow the steps. After launching the Outlook client, you can click on the ‘File’ option from your menu.

After creating a copy of your contacts and calendar locally, now come to a real major step: Migrate mailboxes from GoDaddy to Office 365.

Step 4: Begin the GoDaddy email migration to Office 365
Now that you have set up your Office 365 as well as made local copies of your contacts and calendar information, you are ready to begin the migration. After logging into Office 365 Admin Center, go to Exchange Admin Center. After clicking on ‘Recipients’, select the option of ‘Migration’. Follow the consecutive steps with the guidance of an Office 365 expert.

If you selected the automatic batch migration option, your migration process will have begun, and you shall see the name of your migration batch with the status of ‘Syncing’ next to it if everything went correctly. The whole process might take some time, so please be patient. Once the migration process has been completed successfully, the status shall change to ‘Synced’.

Step 5: Route your incoming email to Office 365
The migration process has been completed, but you need to configure your DNS records so that incoming emails are routed to your Office 365 email mailbox.

Once you update the MX records and Autodiscover records to that of Office 365, any incoming email to GoDaddy shall be redirected to Office 365 instead.

Step 6: Configure Outlook for Office 365
Now that you have successfully migrated from GoDaddy to Office 365, you need to configure your Outlook client for Office 365 as well.

After this, your Outlook client shall restart and when it does, you will see your new profile (which you just updated) listed. The PST files that you had previously created and saved as local copies implemented in Step 3 can now be imported.

Step 7: Delete the migration batch
At this point, you can test whether the incoming emails are being routed to your Office 365 system or not. If it is, then you can go back to the migration wizard and then select the migration batch that says ‘Synced’ as status and click on the trash can icon to delete it. Subsequently, complete any necessary account cleanup on your system.

Email migration is never an easy task; while the steps are not difficult to follow, the process itself can be quite long and tedious to perform. Additionally, there are always chances of errors happening which could cost the company dearly. We provide migration services to help move your email to Office 365 with 24/7 end-user support, without data loss or downtimes during migration.

I hope these steps will be useful to switch from GoDaddy to Office 365.
Paul Wilson