How to Migrate to Microsoft Office 365
Office 365 is a powerful cloud-based bundle of Microsoft including Word, Outlook, SharePoint, Excel, Access, Publisher, PowerPoint, and many more. It offers an array of subscription-based software as services (SaaS) to help eases of access and effective collaboration among the team members. For any organization to migrate from conventions on-premise Office applications to Office 365 calls for efficient planning and execution of the migration road-map to address various issues during the transition phase and smooth migration.
For flawless migration to Office 365, the following steps must be followed in the specified order:
1. Pre-Plan the Migration: Taking a decision to migrate may be challenging for the management as they have a fear of facing resistance from the staff. In the initial phase, you must explain the need or purpose, develop training programs and communicate the change to the staff. You essentially need to devise and assess a workable configuration strategy for AD mailboxes, Skype and SharePoint and analyze how they can be integrated with existing business environment and processes.
2. Plan for the Infrastructure: The bandwidth availability must be assessed and assured as migration requires huge data transfers. Proper analysis must be performed to figure out the hardware requirements and infrastructure necessary to configure the hybrid exchange environment.
3. Select the Deployment Tools: Office 365 comes with the Deployment Readiness Tool that helps analyzing and planning the migration strategies. The tool gathers vital information after analyzing the health of Exchange servers, Active Directory, data privacy requirements, and the firewall infrastructure. The planning tools offered by Microsoft ease out your planning role and help you speed up the entire process to discover a new business environment.
4. Decide for SharePoint And Skype For Business: While migrating, you must choose to deploy the SharePoint On-line service and Skype for Business. Though, SharePoint Online offers seamless integration with Office 365, you need to pre- plan and manage it through the Administration Center that accesses the internet, intranet and the extranet settings. Including SharePoint would require you to manage sites and their permissions, that must be decided in advance. You can take a call on using Skype for Business to enhance the email experience and allow workplace mobility.
5. Migrate: Finally, you can execute the migration plan and pilot test your migration activities. At this stage, you must enable the synchronization of Active Directory (AD) and assign corresponding licenses. After taking the backup and ensuring recovery management system, you can migrate active users’ mailboxes, unused mailboxes, public folders, PST file, email archives and all essential data for driving efficiency in the business operations.
6. Post-Migration Analyses: After successful migration, it is important to ensure that the migration is driving its value and helping business in enhancing performance. At this stage, you can organize frequent trainings to make your staff familiar with the changes, retire the obsolete equipment, and select champions in the technology at department level who can assist other employees in understanding the Office 365 capabilities and work with ease.
Conclusion
Devising a successful Office 365 migration strategy requires you to have in-depth understanding of the core concepts, techniques and best practices that can be acquired with Office 365 training and certification courses offered by authorized training partners of Microsoft.
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