How to Migrate to Office 365

hi I'm Mike Weaver one of the product owners here at quater tech here at Quadra tech we help organizations move to the cloud in this video we're going to talk about steps organizations need to take to both prepare and move into office 365 it's interesting a lot of the stages of technology when it comes to adopting new technology comes down to three major steps one is planning one is execution and one is ongoing maintenance today we're going to talk about those three steps and what you need to do for a successful project so let's talk about planning your migration into office 365 and planning is a really important stage and at this stage you need to ensure that you've done several things including ensuring you meet all the prerequisites for your migration you may have to do some remediation we'll talk about that in a few minutes you need to talk about what workloads are going to move into the service the most common service is email almost every organization when you ask them if they're on office 365 if exchange has been moved they're gonna answer yes but there's other services to talk about here whether it's SharePoint you might have an on-prem SharePoint environment or you may have some network shares that you want to move to SharePoint so you want to do that kind of planning as well user file shares is another very important piece of the planning so moving that data into onedrive for business so let's talk about more aspects to the planning phase during the planning process you're going to need to review your infrastructure review the versions of all the software that you're running and then look at the office 365 minimum requirements we do have a blog on the minimum requirements that you can check to ensure that you're ready for migration during setup you will need to reach certain requirements in order to use certain migration features another aspect of the migration that you need to plan for is identity management how are you going to manage Active Directory IDs during your migration and after your migration for smaller organizations you may choose to move to an entire cloud-based Active Directory system this decision will may allow you to turn off your on-prem Active Directory servers larger organizations are typically going to do a hybrid set up hybrid set ups have certain requirements that you have to meet one of the most important things that you can do today even an early planning is doing using a tool called idée fixe that Microsoft provides this tool will go through in a read-only fashion look at your directory and see if there's any work that you do need to do to prepare some of this work may be difficult it may take a long time so it's important to do this process as soon as possible one prereq that you're also going to have to address when you're migrating Microsoft Exchange is ensuring that your on-prem Microsoft Exchange environment is at minimum levels you check out our blog to look at the minimum requirements depending on your version you may or may not be able to use all the migration options that are available to you to migrate into Office 365 in some cases you may need to use third-party products only because you won't be able to directly move from your version of exchange into exchange online there are two main aspects of planning when it comes to doing your exchange online migration are you going to do one large cutover migration or are you gonna do migration batches or migration waves for organizations with less than a thousand users but maybe more than 500 users you're kind of in between both categories where you may be uncomfortable doing a really large cutover migration but you really could if you needed to do that over a long weekend for organizations with more than a thousand users you're really gonna want to do a staged migration you really don't have the staff typically to deal with user issues mobile device reconfigurations and things like that for a very large cutover migration so most organizations a thousand users enough are going to do staged migrations we also have a great blog on how to group in wave users which is a really important decision when you're doing that process that can help guide you identify dependencies in your organization and ensure that you're moving to exchange online with minimal interruption another aspect of planning that some organizations stumble on is looking at your network topology and bandwidth needs today if you have on-prem Microsoft Exchange and file servers your users are coming directly into your data center to look at these files and look you're their email going forward they're going to be going to the cloud service some organizations focus during a migration on just a bandwidth needs to migrate data into the service but they lose track of is the topology completely changes when you're in a cloud system now your endpoints need to Gale to get out to the Internet and out to the space quickly and effectively some organizations may need to make bandwidth changes or change their agreements with their network providers to ensure that there's enough bandwidth for the users to communicate with the cloud and the final aspect of planning is pilots pilot is an essential part to any IT project and this is no different you really want to do an end end migration with a good chunk of users obviously starting with a few just to begin with but moving to fifty and a hundred user business pilots and practicing every aspect of this this includes user communications ensuring that the end point points to the new system running through the mobile device configuration and really collecting feedback and seeing where you can improve your process the great news is a lot of organizations have moved to office 365 from their on-premise systems before you so the trail has really been well set on how to do this but every organization is different so you really want to ensure that you do a great pilot with your users so you have a great outcome to your project interestingly enough when you do a migration into office 365 the migration is actually one of the easiest aspects of it when we look at all the planning that goes into the project when you hit the migration phase you just have to execute your plan you want to ensure that you're keeping on task and you don't get fatigue in your project for larger projects mistakes can be made because we abandon our plan or we keep changing the plan that we spent so much time on it's really important that you either have a good project manager or really good discipline to stay on the plan that you have a great example is you may agree to use 500 users a week for your migration metric and you keep creeping in 50 more users and then suddenly you realize something breaks in the process maybe there's too much helpdesk volume on Monday morning for users eating assistants things like that can creep in and it really can cause problems in your project and put a pause on it when you have an organization slip so you really want to ensure that you stick to your plan and execute the plan as you designed it the other aspect of migration is what tool are you going to use during the planning phase you likely look at the free tools provided by Microsoft and some third-party tools like the tools I Quattro tech provides regardless of the option that you choose you want to test these and ensure that they meet your needs ensure that you're getting the proper throughput and ensure that there's minimal disruption to the users the other important concept of migration is choosing a solution where you can pre move as much data as possible depending on your organization you may have a lot of data depending on what the quotas are and how much data users have it may not be possible to move 500 users in one weekend so you want a pre-staged and pre move as much data as possible the good news is most technology including some of the free tools by Microsoft and the third-party tools allow you to pre move the bulk of the data in advance that allows you to switch a lot of users at once over the weekend so you can hit your 500 users to 750 user migration goal the other aspect of migration are things other than email we spend a lot of time in this video talking about the email but there are other aspects including PST files and that can be a really difficult project from identifying where they are who they belong to and migrating them effectively without user impact that's something we have a great blog series on as well and certainly something look into another aspect can be an archive system for email or files these systems it's time when you go to office 365 to move them into office 365 as well and get a full return on your investment of the cloud service looking at options to move those can be really tiresome and then sometimes can be a project in itself when we talk about automation automating these projects can be very very important so if you are going to move users from exchange into office 365 and you have an archive system you want to do those projects together automation can help tie these projects together and that's really can save a lot of time in your and keep it on time so now you're in office 365 you've got everybody moved now what do you do when you're on office 365 you need to manage the environment likely when with your on-premise system you've had a lot of tools and processes that you built to manage your environment but suddenly with the migration those tools will not work anymore and very quickly you kind of have a hole in the ability to manage your environment it's really important that you look for reporting solutions that look at not just usage information but also making sense out of the audit log so you can protect your information Microsoft has done a great job of hardening the walls of 365 and keeping your data secure but there's still threats with social engineering and other issues that you want to be aware of quadrant X tools allow you to very quickly get this information and have your entire tool set back very very quickly this includes again not only usage information and what people are using when mobile devices are using but also detecting threats to your environment using our compliance and audit module this allows you to keep track of what users are doing fine threats and react to them as needed the other aspect can be automation so some major problems as you move to office 365 is automation around managing the environment so for example the tools your help desk you use to help your users also need to change very quickly Quadra tech also provides solutions to help organizations manage this environment and enable more users to do their jobs your delegated administration for example you may not want a first line help desk operator to have global administrator rights but there might be some aspects or permissions that require global administrative rights for them to do their functions you can delegate these tasks down in a fully compliant and audited manner so that the organization can be enabled at the first level users love when they call to help desks that they get their problem solved in just a few minutes and you want to have as high of a first contact resolution rate as you possibly can hopefully this video helped you get ready for your migration into office 365 and your journey to the cloud if you have questions or want to talk about the topic a little more you can comment below and we'll monitor it and reply as soon as we can you can also reference our huge variety of blog articles and videos to help get you ready for your migration or you can contact us and we can help get you ready for your migration to office 365 you

Channel: Quadrotech

Views: 25,815

Keywords: Microsoft Office 365, office 365, migrating to o365, exchange to o354, migration to office 365

Id: BwbFUtL9AIE

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019