Many organizations are attracted to the cost savings offered by Office 365’s combination of cloud computing and familiar Microsoft productivity tools. But when companies jump blindly into an Office 365 migration, they soon realize that an efficient, smooth transition is no small feat; it takes smart planning and time.
Before getting started with the productivity suite, you’ll need to transfer your company’s on-premises content to the cloud and migrate your information to the Office 365 environment. A successful migration requires clearly defined objectives and a roadmap of the actions you’ll take and how you’ll accomplish them, as well as a plan for training employees to use the new platform.
Creating Your Migration Checklist
As you would with any project, start planning Office 365 migration by creating a set of high-level priorities and objectives. In other words, what are you trying to accomplish with the Office 365 migration, and what’s the criteria you’ll use to determine success? Next, create the first draft of a comprehensive, step-by-step plan that gets you from your current state to the desired future state. Continue refining this plan into phases and milestones.
Many organizations run into trouble when these migration plans only address the technical aspects, and leave out aspects that are critical to the project’s success, such as training, user adoption, testing and contingency planning. That’s why your plan should be comprehensive, with clearly defined phases and milestones that mark your progress and a process for addressing the inevitable issues and technical hurdles that arise.
Documenting Your Strategy And Decisions
Content migration involves making lots of decisions, and that strategic process should be documented. For example, if you decide to clean up your content or only migrate a subset of what you have available, make sure to document the criteria used to reduce the amount of content that was migrated. This documentation should give people a clear understanding of what was moved and why, such as compliance or record retention reasons.
Your documentation should focus on strategy, training and implementation decisions. Down the road, people may have questions about why you configured Office 365 in a certain way or chose one mode of authentication over another, and this documentation helps everyone understand the decisions that were made.
When you’re moving to Office 365, you don’t need documentation that helps you understand the technical process for future upgrades. Since you’re moving to a platform that’s constantly updated, you’re not going to have to upgrade it down the road.
In the end, careful planning is essential to a successful Office 365 migration, so take the time to research your options online and ask trusted sources in your business community.
Plus, it’s always a good idea to seek out help from Office 365 experts in addition to your company’s internal expertise — you never know what you might be missing. Having a second set of eyes to review what you’re planning is invaluable when you’re moving your systems and valuable business information to the cloud.
Want to learn more about how to cut costs and improve efficiency by moving to a cloud-based productivity suite? Download our new white paper, “7 Office 365 Migration Best Practices”
