When you’ve decided to move to Office 365, or SharePoint Online, a planning roadmap helps ensure a smooth migration of company content, email and other digital resources.
Here are five tips to help you streamline the migration process.
- Get key personnel on board and prepared for change: When you introduce a new technology platform, especially one hosted in the cloud, some roles and responsibilities are bound to change. Make sure individuals who will be affected understand what those changes mean, and what their jobs are going to look like after the migration.As you move routine admin tasks to the cloud provider, some IT staffers need to transition to “solution engineer” roles, serving as advocates and coordinators between the service provider and your company. Give them time to train and understand the differences between Office 365 solutions and their on-premises counterparts. While Office 365 includes familiar features from Exchange and SharePoint, there are some differences in terms of interface and managing technical settings.
- Set up user authentication: Before you start your Office 365 or SharePoint migration, you need to choose one of two methods for authenticating users in the cloud: Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS) or Directory Sync through Windows Azure. Whichever authentication method you choose, make sure you have it in place and running smoothly before you migrate any content for users.
- Migrate your email and SharePoint content one at a time: To avoid technical problems, and adoption headaches, we highly recommend migrating these two types of information separately. Because there are still many moving parts, starting with the less critical resource will provide a buffer to handle adoption issues. For example, if your organization relies heavily on email but uses SharePoint to a lesser degree, migrate your SharePoint infrastructure first. That allows you to work through any authentication quirks and usability issues without having it affect your most important business tool.
- Prepare a realistic timeline for migrating content: Moving all of your company’s information to Office 365 takes a couple of months on average depending on the size of your organization, how much data you have to move, and your network speed/throughput. For a very small organization with modest email or SharePoint setups, the process could take as little as a week; but very large organizations could take several months because it takes a long time to migrate their files from local drives to the cloud. That’s why it’s important to set a realistic timeline and break the migration down into smaller segments. Especially in larger organizations, it’s a good idea to tackle email migration in groups or by department.
- Avoid surprises by communicating early and often: Make sure that everyone in the organization knows what to expect with the Office 365 or SharePoint migration. In addition to a new look and feel, users are bound to encounter some minor hiccups during the migration with authentication and email. For example, when some employees have been moved to the new cloud platform and others are still using the old system, they might have problems booking a room or seeing who is in a user list. Little things like that tend to trip people up, especially if they aren’t expecting it. If you warn them early, they may not like it, but at least it’s not a surprise.
Moving to Office 365 or SharePoint Online opens up all kinds of opportunities for improving productivity and collaboration in your organization. Following these five tips helps to ensure that you stay productive during the migration process.
Learn more about planning your organization’s Office 365 migration by contacting Portal Solutions.
