The last thing your business needs is a botched Office 365 deployment, complete with frustrated customers and a demotivated workforce. That’s why it’s critical to make sure you have a sound strategy for minimising business impact before you even begin to set up Office 365.
Transitions can cause disruptions that can last anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of days. This is due to a variety of shifting factors, including business size, migration method, network performance and much more.
The key to a successful migration is to approach the service with a microscope, assessing your business and the service offerings so you can forecast bumps in the road and manage them accordingly.
A study by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found 88% of global professionals experienced at least one unexpected challenge when moving to the cloud, suggesting organisations are nearly always caught off guard.
Thus, before you set up Office 365, you must meticulously explore potential challenges and risks. Engage other professionals and IT consultants to ascertain how long it will take to set up Office 365 and how much downtime you can afford before it becomes a problem.
Follow our three-step migration plan to cut time and effort from your Office 365 deployment.
1. Choose the right plan
While poor decisions during this stage won’t butcher the benefits Office 365 can provide, choosing the right plan can significantly reduce spending and improve your productivity in the long term.
You should only be paying for what you need right now, so never purchase hundreds of extra seats you don’t intend to fill right away. This is because the cloud embodies cost-effective growth, allowing you to scale IT capacity up or down to meet fluctuating needs.
However, while it’s important not to be a spendthrift, don’t disregard future plans altogether. For example, if you’re planning to rapidly expand beyond 300 seats, it might be prudent to purchase an enterprise plan instead of a midsize plan.
While it’s usually easy to switch plans with Microsoft’s Switch plans wizard, changing plans can disrupt productivity throughout the transition. Switching plans may require extra work, including changing your version of Office, or removing a custom domain from your tenant and replacing it later. It’s important to note the wizard is quicker than manually switching plans with a representative over the phone, but isn’t available for organisations with Open licensing, or over 300 users.
Making the wrong choice initially won’t put your business in peril, but it may lead to extra effort, disturbances and extra spending, if you aren’t careful. Therefore, arm yourself with knowledge about your business and vet each plan’s offerings to get the most out of Office 365.
Advice and takeaways
Don’t be intimidated by the plethora of options available. Choosing the right plan becomes less daunting when you realise your options are limited by your organisation’s specifications and what services add value to your business.
Firstly, understanding your business size will narrow your options down to three. Microsoft offers three plans for small- to medium-sized businesses (up to 300 users) and three enterprise plans for businesses with 300 to 50,000 users. However, comprehending business size is more than just counting heads.
Question whether Office 365 is necessary for every staff member or if you can save money by giving some users a cheaper license type. For example, not all employees will need the feature-rich desktop versions of Office. Those who only require Web App’s light editing capabilities could be assigned to Business Essentials, saving up to $7.50 a month per user.
Once you’ve ascertained the number of users you have, you’re ready to start differentiating between the three plans available to you. For quick elimination, ask yourself whether you require fully-installed Office. Business Essentials and Enterprise E1 only supply Office Online, so if this isn’t an option, you can rule those plans out. On the other hand, if your office is largely comprised of empty desks, this may be the cost-effective plan for you.
Thoroughly vet each plan’s offerings, researching the benefits of Lync, SharePoint, Yammer and paid services like Project Pro. Remember, when you don’t know what something does, it could be an opportunity to enhance productivity in a way you’d never envisage.
The wrong plan won’t cripple your organisation’s success, but the right plan can set your business on a path to unforeseen success, so choose wisely.
Learning from Helly Hansen
Helly Hansen is a global retailer with over 39 outlets and 350 employees. Immobilised by aging and unreliable email and telephony systems, the business decided Exchange Online was the obvious solution. However, further exploration of Microsoft’s cloud offerings showed them countless other ways Office 365 could help.
Grasping E4 licensing for all 350 full-time employees, Helly Hansen transformed their communication systems and travel culture and accelerated business processes.
Sandy Abrahams, IT director at Helly Hansen, oversaw the deployment. “We would have deployed Office 365 just for Exchange Online,” she said, “but we also got Lync Online for instant messaging and conferencing and the opportunity to move to SharePoint Online.”
In addition to receiving fast and reliable email service, Helly Hansen’s workforce uses SharePoint to collaborate seamlessly. They’re able to view updated promotions and store displays in real time and have projected Lync will reduce travel costs by 10-15%.
Just like Helly Hansen, examine what Office 365 services - beyond your basic needs - could complement your organisation. Vet your plan’s offerings carefully, as there are hidden savings littered throughout. Speak with us to determine which plan will boost efficiency and reduce overall expenditure.
2. Check system requirements
Avoid flying by the seat of your pants wherever possible. Failure to check that your system meets the necessary requirements can result in unscheduled downtime and poor user experience. Old versions of operating systems (OS), browsers, devices and poor internet access can lead to unanticipated delays and what staff perceives as unresponsive systems, saddling your workforce productivity in the long term.
The cost of unscheduled downtime is beyond monetary - it can harm customer loyalty, potential lead conversions and reputation. Aberdeen Research found application performance can impact corporate revenue by up to 9%, while Dimensional Research found the most cited implication of unscheduled downtime in small and medium businesses were the loss of employee productivity, followed by lower efficiency and damage to a company’s reputation.
Unscheduled downtime isn’t the only problem. If you haven’t met the system requirements for Office 365, your user experience could be severely impinged, resulting in more headaches for employees and network managers, as well as lost revenue. Frustrated employees may work more slowly or divert to other means of doing their jobs, instead of adopting Office 365. For example, instead of sharing to-do lists via OneNote, employees could manually write and deliver to-do lists around the office, wasting time on emails and walking to other offices.
Such consequences are completely avoidable if you thoroughly check system requirements. Doing so may take a little more time, but increases the likelihood your expectations and the results from your deployment are on par.
Advice and takeaways
Office 365 works best with the latest or immediately previous versions of browsers, OS, Office clients and apps, as well as a good internet connection. Ensure these are up to standard by confirming with a subset of real end users before launching the service.
While Microsoft won’t prevent you from connecting with outdated systems, the quality of user experience will diminish over time. Therefore, talk to both management and lower-level employees about the significance of accurate reporting. Don’t just assume management knows everything about technology in their office from top to bottom. Ensure everyone understands the potential impacts of incorrect reporting and perform updates before implementing the system. A more detailed list of requirements is published here.
If you follow these requirements, you’ll encounter fewer problems further down the track. For example, any companies using Internet Explorer 9 don’t receive code fixes to resolve problems and aren’t always privy to new experiences offered by Office 365. The same applies to Office clients, OS and other software. Any OS not in mainstream support may still connect, but won’t work optimally with Office 365. For instance, companies using XP may experience reduced functionality, as the OS left extended support in 2014.
Remember to check the strength of the internet connection in your main location and remote offices and the connectivity of your devices to avoid poor responsivity. If you have offices in remote locations, where you know latency problems are prominent, you could consider maintaining on-premises Exchange servers for those locations. Network inefficiency and latency can dramatically affect applications with collaboration-dominant workloads, like Office 365. Using the service will likely increase your company’s traffic, so it’s worth visiting Microsoft’s page about planning for bandwidth changes to avoid slow response times.
Checking system requirements can save you a huge sum of time and money in the long term, so be proactive and educate your workforce on the significance of Office 365 prerequisites.
Let’s look at an example
One of our clients, with 35 staff and 5 shopfronts, had a complex migration ahead of them, due to legacy systems and a third-party email application.
It was important the transition was quick, so communications between the head office and its outlets weren’t disrupted and productivity didn’t stall. However, instead of checking that individual employees were following instructions to update devices and OS, managers merely assumed staff members were doing so. Thus, when Office 365 was deployed across their organisation, the service was clunky and had limited functionality.
Without a proper strategy to mitigate the impact on productivity, the company had to perform a technology facelift right away, purchasing new licenses and dealing with the unanticipated costs of a poorly-performing system.
A thorough investigation into your workforce’s client devices, OS, browsers and applications can prevent this situation from happening to your company. Always upgrade the system before an Office 365 implementation to avoid unnecessary business impact.
3. Choose your email migration method
Migrations are not a cookie-cutter process. A successful migration requires careful planning, as organisations have a number of potential challenges facing them. Start shaping your ideal migration method from two factors: the importance of email history and who needs access.
Choosing the right email migration method could save you anywhere from hours to weeks of disrupted user experience. Thus, before deliberating between a cutover, staged or hybrid migration, the foremost question you must ask is whether your staff needs email history at all. Can your workforce ditch a migration altogether and simply start afresh? Do you need all your archived mail? Look at whether it’s a viable option to move archived mail to the cloud, as Office 365 provides virtually unlimited archive storage. However, make sure your decisions are based on necessity, not habit.
Additionally, consider who needs access. Do all departments need email history? For example, if you’re a retail company with a head office and five storefronts, do only your marketing, finance and HR departments need email history? Asking yourself these questions could save you a great deal of time and effort during this critical stage of an Office 365 deployment.
Once you’ve ascertained the importance of email history and who needs access, you’re ready to differentiate between the types of migrations available.
Advice and takeaways
There are a myriad of factors that can interfere with a seamless email migration. Simplify and shorten your Office 365 deployment by examining your existing environment to determine the efficiency of a cutover, staged or hybrid migration.
A cutover migration involves moving everything at once and increases the chances your productivity will be disrupted due to an inability to test beforehand. Organisations use the Exchange Admin Center to migrate all information including Exchange mailboxes, contacts, groups and more. Once cutover has finished, Exchange and Office 365 mailboxes are no longer synchronised and all email is accessible through Office 365.
This is suitable if you can afford the downtime, as there’s no coexistence between the Exchange environment and Office 365. If you’re cutting over, always check that misconfigured firewalls and other security measures won’t be a problem, as odd configurations of proxies and security settings can slow migrations down drastically.
However, if you don’t have an on-premises Exchange server capable of concurrent upload streams for fast importing and want to maintain a high level of productivity throughout, you’ll want to avoid a cutover method. One alternative is a staged migration, where data is migrated in smaller batches for a longer period of coexistence between the hosted and on-premises server. This is a great option for business with a network connection that performs poorly under heavy loads.
A hybrid migration is more complex, suitable for larger organisations with more than 2,000 mailboxes that need a longer coexistence period. This is perfect if you want to migrate at your leisure, as the two environments live in perfect tandem without affecting messaging functionality. When ready, you’re able to move all data to the online tenant and decommission the old environment.
The idiosyncrasies you have to consider when choosing a mail migration method are enough to give anyone a headache. However, there is huge potential for forward-thinking companies to substantially reduce the time taken to deploy Office 365.
Learning from Caltex Australia
Caltex supplies approximately 2,000 retail outlets and employs over 3,500 people nationwide. The company made it a mission to equip its large, dispensed workforce with better productivity tools.
Rather than risk disrupting productivity, Caltex designed a strategy to minimise negative impact and transitioned the entire company over a single weekend.
According to Chief Information Officer at Caltex Australia, Steve Fox, “It was a conscious decision for us to take small steps on our journey to cloud computing. We had Lotus Notes for a long time, and I wanted to stage the delivery of new communication services so we could minimize disruptions and better manage the business change.”
While most enterprises choose a hybrid migration, Caltex transitioned over one weekend. The large, dispersed workforce is now able to either use Microsoft Outlook messaging client or take advantage of browser-based access.
A seamless transition to Office 365 enabled Caltex’s mobile work culture. Choosing a mail migration method with negligible impact will encourage your employees to embrace Office 365 and leverage its capabilities for your business.
Conclusion
Setting up Office 365 requires the careful navigation of a surfeit of possibilities and potential problems. It’s important to invite the help of IT consultants and other experts if you’re struggling to avoid negative outcomes. If you’re feeling apathetic, remember Office 365 will be underpinning everything your business does and taking the time to strategize a smooth deployment will be well worth the effort.
R & G Technologies can help you migrate to Office 365. Learn more about our migration service or contact us for a chat.