Office 365 - Exchange Outline - Outlook Migration

My company has chosen to migrate their email to the cloud-based Office365 system.

This is aka Exchange Online / Microsoft Online etc. The biggest problem is the naming. There seems to be a plethora of names for this product (or others) and they're often used interchangeably.

 Are we using Office 365? Outlook Web App? Exchange Online? Microsoft Online? Outlook.com? All of the above?

While using the software you'll see urls and redirects to nearly every permutation of the above names and more.

Our mail server, for example, is on outlook.com, we cannot, however log into outlook.com to get our mail. 

Anyway, we have lots of users with existing PST files. Some in excess of 10 Gigs. In order to upload / migrate those PST files, I was told to use the PST tool, DO NOT TRY THIS.  It doesn't work and it's a pain in the ass.

Best thing to do is:

1.Export Outlook items to an Outlook Data File(.pst)(Or use their existing one)

2.Connect your desktop Outlook to Office 365 email account.  Best way to do this is to delete the existing profile (in Windows, go to Start / Control Panel / Mail ), and create a new one using the Exchange Online addresses.
This might help:
a. set up your desktop for Office 365. Please refer to the link: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-smallbusinesses/ff637537.aspx

b. Set up Email account in desktop Outlook: In Outlook 2010 In Outlook 2007  (Use the profile manager in the Start / Control Panel to do this most easily)

3. In Outlook 2007 go to File / Import export and select "Import from a file..." and select "Outlook Data File (.pst)".     In Outlook 2010 go to File / Open / Import Export, select  "Import from a file..." and select "Outlook Data File (.pst)".

This begins to import Outlook items from an Outlook Data File(.pst) to Office 365 email box. This can take a LONG TIME. Do not allow the user to stop the process!

 This worked pretty well for us. More on this later.