Office 365 Deployment

It's been a few years, but most of the following should still apply.

We rolled Office out one department at a time. For each department, we met with key people, discussed their needs, and developed rollout schedules. Some groups had heavy Excel/VBA users; for them, we gave them access to the newer version of Excel and had them test their tools before uninstalling their old version. Our helpdesk created software packages that uninstalled older versions and installed the new version, without user intervention. The company I worked for had locked down local admin rights, so users weren't able to install the software on their own equipment, but many were excited about being able to install it on their home computers.

We found that other groups, like the call center, did not need desktop versions of Office, so we gave them a different license. We made online training available to everyone, held regular large group meetings that were open to everyone, and the sponsor used the new tools to make videos about project progress and new features available to everyone.

We leveraged OneDrive to encourage people to stop using their home computers and stop using tools, like DropBox, that the company didn't have control over, for work files; keeping discoverable information in OneDrive. We also established new archiving policies in Outlook, provided training on the new online archive, set new limits on mailbox sizes, and disabled OST files.

We did SharePoint somewhat independent of the Office rollout, due to data migrations and the time it would take. We also took a hybrid approach, where some site collections stayed on-premise, for a while.

The only other thing I can think of, right now, is that we published the rollout schedule and regularly communicated who was in progress and who was next, working with the groups to make sure we avoided major promotions and events they were involved in. The sponsor was highly involved, taking an active role and encouraging adoption.