Harry RumbleTechnical Project Manager| Salem State UniversityMa, United States
Greetings! Our organization is currently underway with preparation from migration to Outlook Exchange 2010 to Office 365; any useful insight from institutions who have done this or are in the process themselves is appreciated! Saving Changes...
We rolled out one team/department at a time, at our corporate office. We're still working on the global markets.
Once we had the infrastructure in place, we ran a small pilot of IT users. Once we were comfortable with the process, we did the following:
* Trained one or more teams in a session - 10-20 people - with an overview of the office apps, how to use OneDrive at work and from home, and how to set up Outlook on their mobile devices
* Provided instructions for how to install new versions of office apps from the portal (the help desk assisted as needed)
* Notified people when their mailboxes would be migrated. We also provided training on setting up and using archive folders in the new Outlook, and made sure they knew to change the archival policy on their archive folder. We are getting rid of PSTs, eventually, and want users to move emails they want to keep, from PSTs, to their archive folder. If they don't change the policy, first, the emails could be deleted shortly after moving them to the archive.
We tried to generate hype for the change - posters, emails, etc... - and used the new tools, as much as possible, when promoting the change. Presentations done in Sway. PowerPoint demos of how to use new features with screen recordings turned into videos. Sharing files. Casting smartphone screens onto a big screen to demonstrate how to set up and use the apps. Using Office Remote to use a smartphone as the remote control for the presentation during training. Created an Office Group that trainees were invited to where they could post questions and find answers to questions previously asked.
Most people just thought it was, initially, an upgrade to a new version of office - a minor inconvenience, at best, while their software was upgraded. A lot of people got excited once they saw what was possible.
A couple of technical notes:
* Start with the tenant name you want. If you change your tenant name, you have to set up a separate subscription and migrate users, mailboxes, etc... Users will have to reconfigure any changes they made, like archival policies. (lesson learned the hard way)
* E1 licenses are great, and cheap, if you don't need desktop versions of the office software. However, if your users need voicemail integrated with Exchange, they'll need an E3 license, even if they don't need desktop software. Saving Changes...
Great insight Aaron. I worked at a prior company when they did this. One small tic that I found, I had to go in and alter some of my cloud user name settings when trying to check documents in/out of SharePoint. Though I can't recall the exact details of the issue I had, I just remember needing to go to Google to figure out how to solve it. So be ready for a few folks to have quirky things happen, depending on how your network is set up especially if people have access to numerous internal networks. Best of luck! Saving Changes...
Everything Aaron and Liana said and the only thing I'll add is to you'll want a dedicated PM to run the interactions to migrate each area of the business. A trusted expert your IT team trusts to use retrospectives for each phase or business area to make improvements as you continue the roll-out and build momentum. Saving Changes...
Harry RumbleTechnical Project Manager| Salem State UniversityMa, United States
Thank you for the insight! Great info and I will most likely be the main point for each department during the migration, so great suggestion to make sure to improve upon each roll-out per department for interactions!
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Aron & Liana, great feedback.
Harry,
We've done the same thing, it was a smooth transition and to be honest with you, Office 365 enhanced our operations and efficiency in many ways. Saving Changes...
Thank you for the insight! Great info and I will most likely be the main point for each department during the migration, so great suggestion to make sure to improve upon each roll-out per department for interactions!
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