Office 365 email migration, now in the beta
The biggest single addition in V2 has nothing to do with SharePoint: it moves mail. It came out of the same problem the rest of the product exists for. The supported route is a scripting exercise, and the tools that are not a scripting exercise are priced for a migration project rather than for an admin who needs to move four mailboxes.
It is switched on in the current beta for Clone Master and trial licences, as three tiles on the Email Tools menu:
Export From O365
Office 365 mailboxes out to .pst files on your machine. Your own
mailbox needs no administrator, so you do not have to raise a ticket to get a copy
of it; an administrator's consent opens up every mailbox in the tenant.
O365 → O365
The merger and demerger case. Sign into both tenants, match each mailbox to its new home, and copy, online archives and shared mailboxes included.
Import to O365
Old .pst files, or mail still sitting on an IMAP or POP3 host, brought
into the Office 365 mailbox it belongs in.
.pst file runs
through Outlook, so it needs desktop Outlook installed on the machine doing the work; the
tenant-to-tenant, IMAP and POP3 routes do not. The full list of what comes across is on the
email migration page, and the
email migration guide walks through
each route screen by screen.
What "complete rebuild" actually means
V1 grew over a decade and it shows in the places you would expect: a single window doing too many jobs, work that could not be paused or resumed, and errors that surfaced as a dialog with no way to copy the text out of it. V2 is a separate application built from scratch rather than a refactor, which is why it installs alongside V1 instead of upgrading it.
The parts most likely to matter on a first run: long operations report progress properly and survive being interrupted, the app updates itself rather than asking you to download an installer, and the sign-in flow asks for what it needs once rather than interrupting a job halfway through to ask again.
Being honest about what beta means
It means a build that is genuinely in use and genuinely unfinished. Some paths have had a lot more real-world mileage than others. If you are planning a migration with a hard deadline and no fallback, run it on V1, which is the version this site sells and the one with the years behind it. If you have a job where you can afford to find a rough edge and tell us about it, the beta is the right place to be, and that feedback is the entire point of running one.
How to get in
Ask. The group is selected rather than closed, so there is no waiting list to join and no qualification to meet. Send a request and mention roughly what you would be pointing it at, whether that is SharePoint migration, mailbox export, or the tenant-to-tenant case. That tells us which scenarios are getting real coverage and which ones we are guessing about.
Request beta access See what V1 does today
Frequently asked questions
How do I get into the beta?
Ask. It is a selected group rather than a closed one, and anyone can request access. Say a little about the tenant you would be running it against, since that helps us prioritise which scenarios get tested.
Does V1 stop working when V2 is released?
No. V1 continues to work and continues to be supported. V2 is a separate application, not an in-place upgrade, so nothing changes on your machine until you install it yourself.
What email migration paths does V2 support?
Three, all switched on in the current beta for Clone Master and trial licences: Office 365 to PST, tenant to tenant including online archives, and PST, IMAP or POP3 into Office 365. They move mail and folders, not calendars or contacts, and the PST routes need desktop Outlook. See Office 365 email migration.
When is V2 released?
It is in beta now, and account holders can run it today. We are not putting a date on general release: if the beta turns up something that needs more time, we would rather fix it than ship to a date.