The cost savings and productivity gains that Office 365 offers were the central focus of Microsoft’s recent Ignite conference.
Many Fortune 100 and 500 companies are taking advantage of the cost savings of moving to the cloud with Office 365, and government agencies are also beginning to use the government version of Office 365.
The two main ways that organizations achieve these cost savings with Office 365 are by moving their Exchange email to the cloud and by moving information management to the cloud with SharePoint Online.
SharePoint has long been Microsoft’s flagship platform for information management and productivity. By hosting SharePoint in Office 365, you continue to have those capabilities, but without the overhead costs of data storage and infrastructure. If your main goal is to move email to the cloud, it’s a relatively seamless transition to using Outlook in Office 365, and you gain the advantage of nearly unlimited storage.
Whether you’re focused on information management or email, you soon run into the larger question with Office 365, which is how to leverage all of its other features.
When you’re migrating to the Office 365 environment, the bottom line is that user adoption is going to depend on how easy the tools are to use, how well you’ve trained and communicated with your users, and how simple you make it for them to choose the right features for the job.
10 Tips For Your Office 365 Transition
- Understand how people work in your organization: In order to make good decisions about information governance and what features to use in Office 365, it’s essential to start by understanding the needs of your users and how they interact with each other to accomplish tasks. Dig into the types of information they’re looking to share and store, and how they work together within your current collaboration platform. With this foundation, you’re better able to deploy Office 365 in ways that make their work easier.
- Develop a plan for communication and change management: Before you transition to Office 365, your users need to know why you’re moving to the cloud, as well as the platform’s capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. They also need to know when they’re likely to experience any changes in the work environment. It’s important to communicate with users about these changes, and give them a timeline for the overall transition, including training activities.Communication is especially important if you plan to introduce improvements to your business processes. Many organizations are introducing new workflows and online forms as part of moving to Office 365, but often fail to communicate these changes and set user expectations. If you’re creating new online forms for certain HR functions, for example, make sure users know where they are, how to use them and how this change makes it easier for them to get things done.
- Think through how you’ll use Office 365’s new features: Microsoft is continuing to roll out new features in Office 365, and many do similar things, which makes for a confusing landscape. As the Ignite conference made clear, Microsoft is responding to user feedback and making various components more intuitive,but not providing prescriptive guidance about when and where you should use a new feature instead of the features you already have.That’s why it’s essential to understand how your users work, choose the best tools and features for their needs, and document the use cases for each one.A good example of these overlapping features is the new Groups collaboration tool, intended to support team dynamics and productivity. Groups is Exchange-based, and essentially works like an email distribution group, in which you invite members to join the group and share a group email address. But it also allows you to store documents, assign tasks and share a group OneNote notebook.The issue with Groups is that many of these features overlap with SharePoint team sites, which many organizations already use. If you give users both sets of collaboration tools without much guidance, you’re likely to create confusion, miscommunication and errors that drain productivity. So before you introduce something like Groups, you need to determine whether the features are better than what you’ve been using, and come up with a plan for how to change user behavior and improve the user experience.
- Define your information governance strategy: Your governance plan should define the use case for each of the different features you plan to implement, and provide guidelines for how to interact with different types of content and where they should be stored.If your organization has been using SharePoint for awhile, you probably created your governance strategy around how people should use team sites and store documents, as well as how workflows tie into your records management strategy. For example, you might have a process in place with SharePoint for moving team collaboration content into final working products that need to be kept for the next seven years.During your Office 365 transition, it’s important to review your governance strategy and make any necessary changes to account for any new tools and features (such as Groups, for example) that will change how you manage information.While it’s important to have a governance strategy in place for your migration and transition to the cloud, this isn’t a one-and-done step. As your organization starts using Office 365, you’ll discover aspects of it that you weren’t aware of initially, and that you want to bring to your users.
- Plan for records management in Office 365: It’s a mistake to just move all of your documents to the cloud and try to rearrange content later. When you’re preparing to migrate you content, it’s best if you think through how you need to organize the information to protect your business and your data, and then migrate it in a way that supports your records management policies and schedule.Think through what needs to be a record, what needs to be retained and what could be thrown away after a time. Setting up records management correctly at the outset helps with organization, compliance and user adoption.
- Develop your migration strategy: Migrating your data to Office 365 could be as simple as working with Microsoft for a month, or it could be more complex and time-consuming, depending on your organization’s needs.Microsoft is now offering options for getting your data to the cloud without the need for third-party migration tools. Since storage space is so inexpensive in Office 365, it’s cost-effective to simply move your entire data repository to the cloud. If you aren’t subject to compliance regulations about the physical location of your data, this all-in migration approach is appealing. Once your data is in the cloud, it’s backed up and secure, and you don’t need to manage on-premises hardware.If that’s not the best option for your company, consider using third-party tools that are tailored to a variety of use cases. If you decide to go this route, it’s important to understand what types of content you’re going to migrate, such as email, web page content, etc.
- Enable single-sign on without multiple prompts: Since Office 365 is a web-based environment, it’s important to consider how your users are going to connect to the cloud. Logging into your network doesn’t automatically log you into Office 365. The problem is that nothing kills user adoption like having to stop in the middle of a task and log into an application.The first time you go to the cloud, you have to log in, but with some planning, it’s possible to avoid that extra step in the future. To enable single sign-on, designate Office 365 sites as “trusted sites” within your network and individual browsers and enable cache to save your password, so that you won’t be prompted again.
- Make sure Microsoft supports any customizations: We all want to tailor and customize Office 365 to reflect our company’s culture and processes, but Microsoft has very strict guidelines for customizations to the cloud. Altering the user interface, such as changing the navigation or the suite bar, may impact the site’s performance and responsiveness — so be careful!One company customized its user interface without making sure the changes were supported, and its sites became horribly slow: It took minutes to load a page. Even though users were told to use Office 365, they ended up creating workarounds through Google and Dropbox because the slow sites were killing productivity. To be safe, it’s best to keep Office 365 as close to its out-of-the-box configuration as possible.
- Consider using content search web parts instead of content query: If you’re experiencing a lag in site performance with Office 365, take a look at the web parts you’re using. A lot of organizations have been using content query web parts to manage the presentation layer of their content on different pages within SharePoint. Content search web parts have similar capabilities, and may be able to improve the performance and load time of your pages.
- Make sure your system works: Straight out of the box, Office 365 works pretty well. If you’re adding any third-party apps and customizing the solution, there’s a risk that these changes could have a negative impact on speed and performance. As you develop your Office 365 environment, make sure you’re testing as you go. Testing is a great way to investigate why pages may not be loading quickly, determine the cause and solve the problem.
Learn more about achieving a smooth transition to Office 365 by downloading our free white paper, 7 Office 365 Migration Best Practices.
