Microsoft Office 365 Migration

Many businesses, organizations and consumers are enjoying the benefits of Microsoft Office 365. In April 2020, Microsoft announced that it now has more than 200 million business users.

By migrating to Microsoft 365, your business can enjoy important benefits, but migration requires careful planning and expert support. Although Microsoft provides automated tools for many parts of the process, Office 365 transitions are complex projects. Most companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses, don’t have the internal resources to manage a transition to Office 365 smoothly and efficiently.

No single Office 365 migration plan is right for every organization. Each situation is different and Microsoft’s best practices contain many options and technical considerations. When you partner with us, your migration plan will be developed specifically for your organization, considering your business environment, goals, culture and unique operations.

At a high level, your plan will include these three elements:

Technical strategy.

The technical component of the migration strategy assesses your organization and its IT configuration, including your current network and applications. It lays out a roadmap for technical and operational procedures, including the order for migrating specific applications and the time each step should take. It also addresses potential issues.

Communications strategy.

The key goal of the communications strategy is getting your managers and users on board with the migration program. Without user buy-in and active participation, the migration can prove much more difficult and user confidence can be diminished, resulting in lower ultimate adoption of Office 365.

Data migration strategy.

If you’ve been in business for a few years, you likely have thousands of files and documents stored in various places on your network. Data can be scattered throughout numerous locations. If you’re like most businesses, a lot of this data may be redundant, obsolete or trivial. But it also includes valuable proprietary information about your business.

An important part of your migration should be cleaning up, reorganizing and moving your data to more secure cloud storage. This will enable your employees to enjoy more timely access and it can present options for deploying new data analytics techniques.