A Brisbane bus and coach manufacturer asked us to help move its email into Microsoft 365. Its web agency had been helping with the move, noticed the business already paid for some Microsoft 365 subscriptions, and asked to be introduced to us. So the job started with three parties at the table, which is a good way to start one.
We logged 4.25 hours across the planning meeting and the migration, between early June and early August 2026.
Planning with the web agency
Our first step was a half-hour meeting with the agency to agree the path. Afterwards they sent a list of every existing mailbox with its size, so we could work out licences and shared mailboxes before creating anything.
That list told us a lot. The email ran on web hosting mailboxes, capped at between 250 MB and 750 MB each. Mailboxes that small fill up, so we expected most of the real mail history to be stored on people’s PCs, and planned the migration around finding it.
The tenant nobody mentioned
When we went to verify the business’s domain in Microsoft 365, we hit an error. It turned out someone at the business had set up a separate Microsoft 365 tenant a while earlier, after trouble with a one-off Office purchase, and it already had a Business Standard subscription attached.
With their permission we added our own administrator account to that tenant and built there, rather than creating a second one. Two tenants for one business is a mess you pay to untangle later.
Setting up the accounts
We created eight user accounts with Microsoft 365 Business Standard licences and five shared mailboxes. We also sent the business a simple form listing the shared mailboxes, so they could tell us who should have access to each one instead of us guessing.
Cutover day
On the day, we connected remotely to eight PCs in turn and set up a new Outlook profile and mailbox on each. We imported the mail files people had stored locally, then switched the domain’s mail over to Microsoft 365, sent test emails and checked the message trace to confirm mail was flowing.
After that we exported the most recent mail from each old profile and imported it into the new one. We asked for every PC to be left on with Outlook open so everything could finish syncing overnight.
One mailbox had to wait. The person who uses the accounts mailbox works remotely on set days, so we finished that one the following week.
The folders that looked empty
In that last mailbox, some imported subfolders showed no mail in Outlook, even though the same folders were full in Outlook on the web. Re-importing didn’t help, and neither did rebuilding the Outlook profile or changing the caching.
The cause was a view setting. The imported folders had kept their old IMAP view, which hides messages marked for deletion. Switching the view on each subfolder brought the mail back into sight.
Where they landed
Eight staff mailboxes and five shared mailboxes now run in Microsoft 365, in the one tenant, with the old mail history imported. We closed the job as complete in early August.
If you’re planning your own move, start by listing every mailbox, its size and where its old mail is really stored, and ask around for any Microsoft account someone may have set up in the past.
If you’d like a hand with that list, get in touch.