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Developing Perfect Office 365 Migration Plan

Posted by Errin O'Connor on Jul, 01, 2021 08:07

Developing Perfect Office 365 Migration Plan

In today’s digital era, Microsoft Office 365 is among the most commonly used platforms for enhancing an organization’s operations. It is a subscription-based service that can help your business be more efficient and profitable. Meanwhile, you need to have an Office 365 migration plan to access the benefits of Microsoft Office 365.                                         

Create Office 365 Migration plan by focusing on below three aspects:

Temporary passwords

As you sort out with Microsoft Office 365, you can work using temporary passwords. With this, you can test the Office 365 environment quickly without issuing login details and official credentials. 

List of the users

It is also essential to have a list of your users, and what they need to do can help migration easier. Your users can easily access the system after migration.                           

Domain Registrar Information 

Keep in mind that domain registrar information is essential for the migration of Microsoft Office 365. Thus, email is one of the basic features of Office 365. You need complete domain registrar details to have a seamless changeover between Microsoft Outlook and your previous email client. 

How to design the Office 365 migration plan

The following are the steps to achieve perfect Office 365 migration.

1. Pre-Planning

If you migrate to Office 365, you need to plan. You can consider the following questions before the migration. 

  • What are the benefits you can get from Office 365 migration? 
  • How does the migration change your infrastructure?
  • Why do you choose to migrate?
  • How does the migration change the user experience? 
  • How do you train your team using Microsoft Office 365?

By asking these questions, you will know whether you’re ready to migrate or not. It is also necessary to ensure that your team knows how migration can affect their job. In planning, you can also consider synchronizing Exchange and SharePoint and updating DNS to point to Office 365. You can validate the environment and configure the mobile environment. 

Office Migration Consulting

2. Infrastructure planning

The next step is to plan for your infrastructure. The Microsoft 365 environment will be established on your infrastructure. So, plan before the migration. You can consider the following for your infrastructure:

Hardware

The migration process is also a good chance to the stock of your hardware. For example, do you need a specific server for Skype for Business for the new environment? 

Bandwidth

Ensure that your bandwidth can support many concurrent machines running Microsoft Office 365 that depict the necessary connection and network segments. 

Software 

Microsoft Office 365 can virtually offer all software that you can use.

However, if you and your team use mail-enabled applications, and you need them post-migration, ensure that they’re compatible with Exchange Web Services. 

3. Equip your business with a deployment tool 

With Microsoft 365, you need a deployment tool in your Office 365 migration plan. The best about the platform is that it can provide you with Deployment Readiness Tool. With it, you can let users plan for different aspects for a perfect migration, like environment discovery.

With this deployment tool, you can collect and analyze your domain settings and the IT system’s Active Directory. The tool also helps you take stock of your SharePoint, Exchange, Skype for Business, and End User environment settings. 

The Deployment Readiness Tool allows you to log your network settings and configuration to carry them over in the migration. In addition, Microsoft also comes with Planning and Assessment Toolkit. Even though it is not primarily designed for Office 365, it is beneficial for the inventory and discovery of cloud applications and services. You can use the Planning and Assessment Toolkit for migrating from a hybrid or cloud-based environment. 

4. App-specific planning 

The next step is to plan for a specific app. There are various Microsoft services and apps that need to be considered as you migrate. 

Skype for Business 

If you use Skype for Business, especially for Instant Messaging, make sure your team knows how. The Windows Live in the app is supported for public IM, but not Yahoo. If you want to use public IM, you need to migrate from Yahoo entirely. 

SharePoint 

Before the SharePoint connection, you need to take few steps through Administration Center. You can double-check Intranet, Internet, and Extranet settings, global site collection settings, MySite, and user profiles. Make sure that the settings suit your current environment. You can also contact EPCGroup for SharePoint consulting services in Office 365 setup. 

5. Layout the end-user experience

Before beginning the migration, make sure that your team knows about it. It is also crucial that the browsers used in the workplace are supported for web-based office 365, and operating systems are supported for suite:

Operating stems: Microsoft Office 2010, 2008 for Mac, 2007 SP2, and Office Web Apps

Supported browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome

6. Migrate

After you complete the steps mentioned above, you can now migrate. If you want to have a successful migration, it is important to plan and prepare. You need more patience and apply the steps carefully. 

7.  Validate and remediate 

Lastly, you can assess the migration. You can collect feedback from your users on how it works. It is also a good idea to address any problem that needs to be fixed after the migration. Communicate with your end-users to know how to verify the information and customize preferences. 

Keep in mind that post-migration follow-up is necessary. Thus, migration of data to the cloud without implementing tools and processes to support Office 365 can increase costs. It can also lead to complicated support in some future time. 

There we go, so those are the steps to achieving a perfect office 365 migration plan. By following these steps, you can make the best use of the platform. As a result, you can enhance the operations of your organization with Microsoft Office 365 migration. 

Now that you have learned how to migrate Microsoft Office 365 successfully, is the platform good for you? Read more to find out the answer.

You can also choose to go for Office 365 consulting for implementation and migration plan with EPCGroup. We are Microsoft Gold Certified partner and have over 24+ years of IT experience.

Microsoft Office 365 defined 

To know if the platform is right for your organization, you need to understand it first. Microsoft Office 365 is a service based on subscription to improve Microsoft applications, including Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with accessibility and flexibility of the cloud. You can check the pricing and licensing structure of Office 365

The platform can be broken down into versions, the premium desktop, and web-based.

Premium Office 365

The Premium Office 365 comes with more advanced features:

  • Teams ( tool for meetings, collaboration, communication, and chat) 
  • Exchange ( calendaring and mail serve management)
  • Planner ( teamwork and task management)
  • SharePoint ( website building tool to organize, share, access, and store information)
  • Customer relationship management features
  • Yammer, Microsoft’s social media platform which allows users to collaborate with each other

Web-based Microsoft Office 365 

This web based version of Microsoft Office 365 can give you a wide collection of Microsoft Office apps:

  • Excel (spreadsheets)
  • Word (word processing)
  • OneNote (note-taking)
  • PowerPoint (presentations)
  • Access ( database management for PCs only)
  • Outlook (email)
  • OneDrive ( synchronization and file hosting with 1 TB of storage)

Office 365 for government is also an option for public sector organizations.

What are the Benefits of Migrating to Microsoft Office 365?

Microsoft Office 365 implementation can provide great benefits for your organization, and if office 365 migration plan is executed perfectly then there is a minimum amount of downtime.

Provides new apps and tools to improve your business operations

Office 365 comes with new applications and tools that other platforms don’t offer. For example, it can provide you with a OneDrive tool for simple and fast file sharing between users in an organization. Office 365 also has project management capabilities. The platform also has Microsoft Teams for real-time communication, including video conferencing and instant messaging. Additionally, Skype for Business is also accessible on desktop, mobile, and Outlook web interfaces. 

Flexible working

The best about migrating to Microsoft Office 365 is it allows your team for flexible working. They can work anytime and anywhere using any device. It is also beneficial for improving productivity in your organization. Also, it can offer you with single data source since you can store your files in a Microsoft data center. 

Security features 

Microsoft Office 365 also comes with security features. With this, you can make your business safe while in the cloud. It has TSL/ SSL encryption to ensure that no one will access files or communications without authorization.

The platform also regularly checks the systems for malicious activity. It has a strong incident response protocol.

Some other security features of Microsoft Exchange include:

  • Email protection against malware with antivirus and anti-spam filtering software.
  • Up-to-date antivirus signatures.
  • Microsoft Trustworthy Computing security measures. 

Instant access and upgrades for new features 

Another benefit of the Microsoft office 365 migration plan is that you can instantly access upgrades and new features. It lets your team use more advanced solutions and technologies to enhance their productivity and workload. 

Accessible on different devices 

You can access Office 365 on different devices, including modern systems such as Mac computers, Windows computers, Android, and iPhone mobile devices. With this, you and your team can have a hassle-free experience working with the platform. 

Bigger mailbox storage 

It can provide you with bigger mailbox storage. With that, you can safely keep emails in the cloud.                        

Conclusion 

To sum it up, Microsoft Office 365 can help to increase the productivity and profitability of your business or organization. It can enhance collaboration among your team for successful business projects. Get started with office 365 migration plan for taking your business into clouds.

Errin O'Connor
About the Author

Errin O'Connor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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