OFFICE 365 MIGRATION GUIDE: Office 365 migration challenges and office 365 migration planning

welcome to today's edition of chromecast check it out i'm sam major and once again joined by rupert mills my business partner and co-founder today we'll talk about the technical considerations of moving from on-premise exchange to 365. microsoft state they now have over a million business customers for 365 with the usb in the largest market but the uk being the second largest consumer of this service clearly microsoft plan is to encourage us all into the cloud and given that do you think that 2019 is the last iteration we'll see of on-premise exchange and what are the pros and cons of that honestly no um we were told that exchange 2016 was going to be the last on-premise exchange uh then along came 2019. so i would i would suggest that we're likely to consider and continue in the same vein exchange itself i think has been around for obviously since 1996 something like that and from that perspective it's it's been a product that was one of microsoft's leading products for years they are without a doubt pushing everybody to office 365 makes total sense from their perspective but there's always going to be those niche systems which you can't do it with so we've got customers who are in very remote jungles on small islands et cetera and the connectivity there for running an off for running a cloud-based service just isn't there and i think probably what's happened is that the the people within microsoft realized that where you've got a large corporate who's going to have most of their people in office 365 they need a hybrid environment because they need to be able to keep those few small people still in a remote location so i doubt that it will be the last version so on a previous podcast we've talked about how microsoft are encouraging us all into 365 and cloud services uh in general and you talked also about how it doesn't fit for everyone it's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to to be cloud or to be on prem um in your experience in your opinion what are the key considerations that we need to factor in when looking at do we migrate to the cloud so a lot of those migrations can be quite simple um it's often relatively straightforward to migrate but the key thing for me is getting the tenant right in the first instance so a tenant is kind of the cloud-based equivalent of an active directory or something along those lines where it's the underlying piece that pins together the entire infrastructure for what you're building there's a lot of people that will take the approach of okay i need to get a cloud service up and running so it might be teams is a common one especially with what's happened recently with kobit 19 et cetera but from that perspective the key piece is getting the tenants set up right because if you go and say i'm just doing this to get teams running and you create a tenant that isn't correct for the rest of your organization it's actually remarkably difficult to unpick that later without just turning the whole thing off and starting again so getting the tenant right is almost like setting the foundations right if you're building a house or building your active directory properly in the first place if you get it set up right then you can easily build on an improvement implement the other services later on you can easily build on it and implement the other services later on but if you get it set up wrong then that means you could end up having to have a lot of cost in setting it right later or essentially unpick and start again so getting the tenant set up right is really the key thing that i'd say is most concerned when you're starting from starting an office it's interesting one i was going to ask you know is there the easiest way to migrate you know the silver bullet the panacea way of doing it doesn't seem like there is other than the pre-planning it's very all the products we undertake it all starts with that definition workshop understanding what we're doing and why we're doing it and that seems to fit very much in line with our methodology and ways of working yeah i would say that that's that's definitely the case you need to look at what the client is trying to achieve and how big they are in order to take the right approach for them some people there will massively overblow it and some people will under consider what's going on for me there's kind of two approaches there's either a big bang approach where you take everything and you push it all in one go or there's a stage migration approach up to about 50 people you can take a big bang approach and just say right we're gonna tell everybody emails down for the weekend we'll migrate you over and when you come back on monday you have a new system we can set that up and get that moved over you can handhold it through very quickly if you are more than 50 users then actually a stage migration approach where you have both systems living in coexistence for a while you migrate a few users you test it etc is probably a much more um sensitive way to go about the migration is much more um user-friendly for those end users no one likes change yeah no one likes change exactly but for me the key point is that actually we've we've had clients with 10 users who've said right i want to have migration workshops and how we're gonna 10 users we can do that in less than a day just let's move them all over and get them done all of that time that you spend planning it's probably more time than it's going to take through the whole migration yeah whereas we've had customers with 500 600 users maybe a thousand users who said oh this is easy we'll just turn on office 365 and if they don't get the tenant set right properly in the first case they don't get the coexistence right and they try and do it in a big bang trying to migrate 500 users of worth of email over a weekend is challenging um so so there's there's the two different approaches and really it's about choosing the right one for the business and then working through with the client what else there is that intertwines with the existing mail system with the event of multi-device environments now being incredibly common so smartphones ipads tablets gosh everything you know everyone's walking around with a plethora of devices on us um how does this affect how we plan migrations and what impact can that have so you need to consider mail access from any device um obviously as you say people were historically you'd sit down at your pc use your email and that was how you migrated now you've got your mobile you've got whatever other devices you've got other systems linked in and you need to plan that so for us it can be a question of looking at pushing out configs to devices what kind of mobile device management do you have in place there's other things like the outlook client on your desktop so the later versions of exchange require a minimum level of outlook in order to operate so for example we've seen clients where they've got very old versions of office still within their environment they've said oh yeah we're going to migrate to 365 pushed up to 365 and then hang on a minute not my outlook users will connect anymore well no because you've got a very old version of office and so taking all of those things and pointing them out up front can save the the pain of trying to solve them on the day later on um but it's one of those that actually you need to take a look at all the possible connections into your exchange server environment and how those connections are going to migrate so it's um it's important to do your homework it's back to the pre-planning back to the free plan absolutely so as a business we've undertaken some small ones but also some very large uh migrations you know including up to 150 000 mailboxes plus um when planning enterprise scale migrations what lessons have we learned i guess what's what's the most nasty or important gotcha that people need to consider when they're looking at large enterprise migrations large enterprise migrations i would suggest that you need to be looking at all the things outside of your user base so the user base tend to be the obvious area to look at okay we've got x number of users to migrate with x number of male data or x amount of male data and and you you can work out fairly quickly a ratio of how many you can move a day how long that migration is going to take and how it's all going to work and fit together but it's actually all the other historic applications that you know especially in the large enterprise will have been built over time are going to have hooks into the mail system they may not support modern mail protocols they may be looking for particular it's not uncommon for people over time to hard code things into exchange into servers to point to certain exchange servers or whatever that may be so so that's a really common one i would say looking at your archive don't forget your archive people often say right we're going to move all the data into office 365 and then we're going to turn on the microsoft compliance features and we've got archiving well that's great but if you've got an existing archive how do you get all the data out of that and into your office 365 or if you're not going to and you're going to let that run down over time you need to budget for keeping that existing archive and potentially an existing exchange server in place to keep that running through until it ages out over 3 7 10 whatever your compliance regime of years is but you need to make sure that you've taken into account keeping that running because often people don't um outside of that i would say don't migrate the vips first it's um it's it's not uncommon for people to say i want to put the put the vips in show them the new functionality show them all the new stuff they've got and actually they're the people who are going to be most time constrained with regard to troubleshooting or solving any problems at the time so our recommendation is don't migrate the vips first no matter how tempting it may be that's a that's always a challenging one um but yeah other than that it's the it's the it's the systems in the periphery the systems around it that you need to make sure you really take it take care of and then obviously we've talked about before backup thereafter so once you've put all the data there how are you looking after it and what are you doing to back it up so um those would be the gotchas from my perspective brilliant thank you um that's us for today hopefully that's been useful uh if you'd like us to cover anything more detail we'd like to ask us questions by all means uh put them in the comments section below and please remember to like subscribe share um and give us feedback it's always useful it helps us shape the content of the various people that i'll have on the podcast with me thank you for joining us this has been chromecast check it out

Channel: Krome Technologies

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Keywords: Office 365 migration, office 365 migration step by step, Microsoft Office 365 migration, planning an O365 migration, Office 365 migration guide, Migration of office 365, office 365 migration challenges, exchange to office 365 migration, office 365 migration planning, microsoft office 365 migration planning, migrating from microsoft exchange to o365, office 365 technical considerations, O365, email migration, office 365, office 365 tenant, office 365 tenant to tenant migration

Id: t6kc7DwNgWg

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021