Mail enabled object

Question

What are mail enabled objects and why do we create those after staged migration?

Answer 1

Hi SahilSharma5307,

After you have successfully migrated a batch of mailboxes, you need some way to let users get to their mail. A user whose mailbox has been migrated now has both a mailbox on-premises and one in Office 365. Users who have a mailbox in Office 365 will stop receiving new mail in their on-premises mailbox.

Because you are not done with your migrations, you are not yet ready to direct all users to Office 365 for their email. So what do you do for those people who have both? What you can do is change the on-premises mailboxes that you've already migrated to mail-enabled users. When you change from a mailbox to a mail-enabled user, you can direct the user to Office 365 for their email instead of going to their on-premises mailbox.

Another important reason to convert on-premises mailboxes to mail-enabled users is to retain proxy addresses from the Exchange Online mailboxes by copying proxy addresses to the mail-enabled users. This lets you manage cloud-based users from your on-premises organization by using Active Directory. Also, if you decide to decommission your on-premises Exchange organization after all mailboxes are migrated to Exchange Online, the proxy addresses you’ve copied to the mail-enabled users will remain in your on-premises Active Directory.

*Note: On June 17th, this community is migrating to Microsoft Community at http://answers.microsoft.com. If you need further assistance, please post a new question to the Office 365 for business forum beginning June 18th Pacific Time. Thank you for your understanding.

Thanks,

Brook