Office 365 migration best practices

Like many others this year, you’re considering moving to the Cloud on Office 365, and it’s a great idea! Office 365 offers a great deal of useful features that could give your organization and employees a brand new set of possibilities. But before you start an Office 365 migration, there are a few things you should consider.

We’ve already talked about building an inventory before your migration, and I invite you to check out this episode, it’ll be of great help. (You can also put your inventory in Visio once it’s done!) But it’s far from everything you’ll need to do a perfect Office 365 migration. Let’s check it out!

Office 365 migration best practices

So, What do you think? If there’s one thing you should take away here, it’s that you must figure out what you’ll be doing once in Office 365. This will help you set the right foundations for a healthy environment that answers your and your users’ needs and stay relevant in the long run. Have you done an Office 365 migration without considering all this? How did it go?

Video transcript

In this video, I want to talk about your Office 365 migration. Let’s check it out.

Hi, my name is Benjamin Niaulin. I’m a SharePoint MVP working all the way up in the North in Montreal at the Sharegate office.

This time, I wanted to talk about Office 365 migration. I know we’ve talked about it before, but more focus on building an inventory. And I still encourage you to go check that out. They’ll show you exactly how to build an inventory of what you have using things like Powershell, that organize it properly so that you can tack it into the right order and bring it to Office 365. And there’s tons of other tips on that as well, but what I wanted to focus on this time, is really what is, or what tips I can give you with what it is that you have that you need to migrate to Office 365.

Office 365 isn’t just an Online SharePoint

Now obviously Office 365 is not just SharePoint anymore. If we’re still talking SharePoint, it’s just not where everything is going. We’re talking about Office 365, which means your office at the tip of your fingers, whenever you want it, from any device, right? That’s where we’re going. And SharePoint is just a piece that’s part of this entire suite. So when we’re going to be talking about your Office 365 migration, we’re going to be talking about the migration of your e-mails, for example, your mailboxes, to the Cloud.

First, I encourage you to check out the tool that Microsoft offers for free to help you migrate your Exchange e-mail inboxes to Office 365. It works, honestly, pretty well and doesn’t necessarily require you to buy other extra tools to start doing that e-mail migration necessarily. Of course, there are some out there. Depending on your needs, I encourage you to check all of that out, but that’s one aspect that you should check out.

What’s important, however, is during this move to Office 365, whether you’re bringing your e-mail inboxes, your FileShares, your other previous SharePoint on premises, or you want to do some hybrid stuff, when you’re going to Office 365, you need to understand that over there everything’s changed. And there you’ll have to think about the architecture that you want to put into place, what you want to use, so that when you start doing your migration, the actual migration isn’t the most difficult part. You know, unfortunately, right now, you have to use tools, whether it’s Microsoft or it’s Sharegate, of course, or other tools, but you’ll have to use tools to migrate to Office 365.

The things to consider before an Office 365 migration

That’s not the hard part because once you’ve got that down, you’ll be able to get there. What’s important is, what are you going to be using there, right? Because it’s not just about bringing your inboxes or your files. It’s what are you going to use? Are you going to be using Groups for Office 365? Do you understand how that works? And can it replace your public folders? Can it replace some of your team sites? If so, can you bring your Fileshares or your documents that are in these team sites into these new groups? How are you gonna set that up?

So I encourage you that when you look at your migration if you’re bringing FileShares to Office 365, you do the same thing. If you’re bringing on premises SharePoint 2010 or 2013 to Office 365, again, you look at the architecture you plan to put into place. What do you think you’re going to be using? Right? Delve, Video Portal. Are you going be using Video Portal or SharePoint videos? Are you going to be using Delve, or are you going to do a search-driven intranet? Are you gonna be u-, you get what I mean.

So what I encourage you to check out is before you look at the migration piece, is to actually figure out what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it, and which pieces of Office 365 you’re going to use to do it.

Check out some of the tips and URL’s that we set up and how-to’s in this blog post. Hopefully, it’ll help out. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week in the next Between Two Farms.

And lastly, check out our meticulously crafted Office 365 migration checklist, designed to minimize disruptions and streamline your migration process