I recently ran the wizard with a client to see all the new changes and to access what we could copy and what the experience was while running the wizard. Here are my observations… and my final verdict on the experience:
(1) User Experience
This part is initially a good one. The first encounter with the change is on the ‘Hybrid Features’ screen for the Office 365 Hybrid Configuration wizard:
We see there is a checkbox for ‘Organization Configuration Transfer’, which is unchecked by default. This forces the administrator to ‘opt in’ to this copy process. After the check box is the wizard begins to gather data on what can be transferred:
Additional Checks:
Once the wizard completed the checks (and I like that I can see them flash by, even though it is hard to keep track of each and every item that is checked, we get a screen that notifies us that we can transfer settings – with an option to not trasnfer anything. Note we need to review all objects first:
If we click review, we find the bulk of the information about items we can transfer to the cloud:
(2) Reviewing Items to be Transferred
Here is where I take issue with the information. There is very little explanation of what we are looking at. While an experience engineer may get what is being displayed and understand that we are reviewing many objects (Retention Tags for example), someone else may not understand what this all means. Let’s review some of items that we can copy to Exchange Online
As we can see, there are quite a few items that can be moved over to Office 365. I especially like Retention items as well as Transport config items as they will lessen the time required to fully configure Exchange Online from scratch.
(3) Transfer of Config Items:
Once we’ve selected the items we want transferred, we can click next and let the wizard do it’s thing. Items that are copied and any tasks that are performed are stored in logs that can be pulled from the wizard or are stored locally on the server. I find this to be a good and well designed process. No issues here.
Final verdict – Mixed bag
The reason that I am assessing this feature as a mixed bag is based on the information provided in the wizard and the lack of guidance that the wizard provides. While I do not expect Microsoft to provide an exact recommendation or a set of instructions / decision tree on how to handle all scenarios, I would expect a bit more. As such, I wanted to provide some feature suggestions and then I added a poll at the bottom of the article to see what you, the reader, think about my suggestions.
One improvement I think would help would be some sort of summary pane (maybe at the bottom?) or some sort of logic built-in that could point out why one option should be chosen over the other. Sample markup:
Notice the explanation box, if we had something like this, making the decision might be a bit easier.
Another example would be like so:
Further Thoughts
It’s one thing to copy these configuration items to Exchange Online, but how do we take the Security and Compliance Center into account? If we import these items, would we cause any issue with the settings in the Security and Compliance Center.
I previously blogged about this last year and am using this post as an update to that one from 2018:
https://justaucguy.wordpress.com/2018/08/29/exchange-online-hybrid-organization-configuration-transfer/
