Its difficult to get a straight answer to this question ....
We have 16 users on Email Lite (powered by Office 365) and want to upgrade all to Office365 with BT. This will give Exchange Online, etc to all users along with web versions of the Office suite. What it does not give you is the ability to upgrade further to Office365 Small Business Premium to have desktop versions of the Office suite included.
So as i understand it, I can upgrade the current users by simply buying 16 Office365 licences online. I then have to deactivate everyone of the existing Email Lite accounts before I can start upgrading, having to wait an hour or two for this to propagate before continuing. During this time, incoming mail will be stacked to be delivered once the upgrade is completed. What happens to all the existing mailboxes, are they lost forever or will they be transfered to the new Office365 inboxes. Hopefully at this point we have 16 accounts fully transfered to the Office 365 with no alteration to the existing xx.xx@xxxxxxx.com email addresses and we have full access to the Exchange Online, etc features.
Since most users will need to work offline we require desktop versions of the Office suite for them all. BT do not offer this upgrade to Small Business Premium and point you to Microsoft directly. If you log in to Microsoft before you have upgraded, it will accept the existing xx.xx@xxxxx.com as an ID but will not allow any purchase to proceed. Which seems sensible since you are only a member of the EmailLite service.
What I want to confirm is that having gone down the route of upgrading with BT and then switching over to Microsoft to complete the Small Business Premium purchase will it all work seamlessly from the single xx.xx@xxxxx.com account names or are there any gotcha's that will get in the way. Has anyone successfully gone through this process and come out the other end with no problems ?
