GAL Slow Migration from Exchange Server to Microsoft 365
Primary Actor: Eagle Edge Technologies
Client’s Pain Point
Eagle Edge Technologies, LLC is a prominent cybersecurity company in the San Franciso Bay Area that was looking to migrate its Global Address List (GAL) contacts from an exchange server to Microsoft’s cloud service, Microsoft 365. The company had a robust GAL which incorporated employee contacts, customers, vendors, and other individuals of import. At an internal meeting, Sean, IT manager at Eagle Edge, highlighted that the transition process would take time, and for a while, they intended to operate in a hybrid environment. However, he informed management that this would create a logistical nightmare, as Microsoft’s migration services only allowed for GAL contacts that have an associated mailbox to be transferred – in short, all their external GAL contacts would be lost in the process. Furthermore, while it was possible to copy over these contacts, any changes made to the exchange GAL would have to be manually updated in the Microsoft 365 GAL – a process that Sean believed would waste undue hours and be prone to error. At the time, the company had well over 14,000 contacts to be migrated, including employees, customers, and vendors.
Their Solution
Sean finds a suite of solutions for GAL migration; itrezzo Unified Contacts Manager (UCM) and CiraHub. To perform the migration, Sean first started up a process on itrezzo to sync Eagle Edge’s exchange GAL to a read-only exchange public folder contact list. Then, he utilized CiraHub to read those public folder contacts and sync them to the company’s Microsoft 365 Global Address list. The result was anytime a contact was added to the company’s exchange Global Address list, that contact would be reflected in their new Microsoft 365 GAL. Those contacts would then be synced to employee phones on a regular basis. As a result, Sean estimates this saves his department currently saves at least 4-5 hours a week in routine data management tasks.