Migration to Exchange Online and Office 365: A Step-by-Step Guide Migration to Exchange Online and Office 365: A Step-by-Step Guide pre-requisites, and require an uncommon depth of technical ability. Organizations migrating to Office 365 should evaluate the migration tools available from third-party vendors to streamline, simplify, and properly structure their migration activities across Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive. • Every organization operating under compliance requirements or who hold current email archives that need to be migrated without breaching archiving integrity should definitely get expert assistance from third-party migration vendors. The risk of being out of compliance, or breaking chain of custody in email archives is too high to do otherwise. ABOUT THIS WHITE PAPER This white paper was sponsored by Quest – information about the company is included at the end of this paper. A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO THE MIGRATION Organizations that have migrated to Office 365 have implemented various types of solutions and capabilities to support their use of the platform, as shown in Figure 2. Any organization with established business processes, current onpremises infrastructure, and historical data under management faces a significant planning exercise in evaluating the shift to Office 365. Figure 2 Solutions and Capabilities Implemented to Support Migration to Office 365 Among Organizations That Will Deploy Office 365 by 2017 Source: Osterman Research, Inc. STEP 1: FACE THE REALITIES OF MIGRATING TO OFFICE 365 Any organization with established business processes, current on-premises infrastructure, and historical data under management faces a significant planning exercise in evaluating the shift to Office 365, along with a set of discrete tasks in actually doing so. There are numerous critical decisions to make while planning the shift to Office 365—including how to achieve value from doing so, the approach to take, whether to involve an external consultancy, and the selection of third-party migration tools. ©2016 Osterman Research, Inc. 2 Migration to Exchange Online and Office 365: A Step-by-Step Guide The migration process itself requires the appropriate mindset, approach, and a set of technical skills, tools, and experiences that are not always readily available among an organization’s current IT professionals—or as some early adopters have discovered, even among external IT consultancies. Getting it right is important: if the migration process doesn’t work perfectly, staff won’t have the ability to read and respond to email, schedule meetings and book resources, and assistants won’t be able to manage their bosses calendar. Just thinking of Exchange at the moment, messaging is a mission-critical system for almost all organizations—so getting a migration right is critical. STEP 2: MAKE FOR HOW YOU WILL USE OFFICE 365 Office 365 provides an array of capabilities for enabling communication, collaboration, and compliance for organizations. An early task to complete in evaluating the shift to Office 365 is how your organization will make use of the capabilities on offer. Aspects include: • Whether to cherry-pick specific capabilities from Office 365 for use, such as Exchange Online or Exchange Online Archiving, or alternatively use most or all of the cloud services on offer. • Deciding whether to embrace a hybrid approach to specific capabilities, where some services are provided from Office 365 and complementary services are delivered through on-premises servers (for example, some Exchange mailboxes in Office 365 and others retained on-premises). A hybrid approach can be a short-term route for migrating to Office 365, or a long-term strategy for optimizing IT service delivery. • Once staff have new capabilities available from Office 365, how will you lead staff to the effective use of these new tools in their work? Getting business value from Office 365 requires creating new approaches to business processes enabled by new tools that streamline current processes by removing inefficiencies, creating innovation, or introducing greater effectiveness. The migration process itself requires the appropriate mindset, approach, and a set of technical skills, tools, and experiences that are not always readily available among an organization’s current IT professionals. In addition to deciding how to use Office 365, it is essential to know if there are other competing or complementary IT initiatives being undertaken at your organization that might impact the scope or timeline for a migration to Office 365, such as a refresh of end-user devices. Current litigation or in-progress evaluations of possible acquisition targets will also directly impact on the ability to move particular mailboxes to Exchange Online and your ability to migrate email archives. STEP 3: PROCURE THE OFFICE 365 PLAN THAT MAKES SENSE FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION Microsoft offers a number of plans for Office 365, with increasing levels of capability and service coverage. An organization that wants to use a hybrid configuration between on-premises servers and Office 365 must select a plan that supports Azure Active Directory to enable administration tasks and seamless identity management between the two environments. Other considerations in selecting a plan includes: • Organizations with a global footprint or strict data sovereignty requirements in some geographies need to decide between a single Office 365 tenant or the use of multiple tenants. While an organization can set up multiple cooperative tenants to comply with data sovereignty and address other practical issues, a multi-tenant approach comes with a range of complexities. • Organizations with fluctuating staff numbers over the year could choose to forego the slightly cheaper plans that require an annual commitment and instead sign up for a plan that only requires a monthly commitment. This allows an organization to optimize its cost commitment to Microsoft, but does require ©2016 Osterman Research, Inc. 3 Please complete the form to gain access to this content Access Now Related Resources How to Boost Clients' End User Device Security in New Flexible Workforce Environments Tackling Annual Summer Reimaging A Three Step Approach to Keeping Your Network Safe from Ransomware (ATT) A Three Step Approach to Keeping Your Network Safe from Ransomware (REG) Reversing Office 365 Tenant Sprawl (REG) Reversing Office 365 Tenant Sprawl (ATT) Access Hoarders, Group Sprawl and Permission Creep: Cleaning up AD (Registered) Access Hoarders, Group Sprawl and Permission Creep: Cleaning up AD (Attended) Data Growth and the MSP Moving Workloads to the Cloud - Attended SharePlex Q3FY20 - Zero impact database migration SharePlex Q3FY20 - Moving Your Databases to the Cloud DPM Q3FY20 - Managing Cross-Platform Database Environments DPM Q3FY20 - Accelerate Database Efficiency with SQL Performance Investigator (PI) DPM Q3FY20 - DBAs Face New Challenges: Trend in Database Administration SharePlex Q3FY20 - Simplify Your Database Migrations and Upgrades SharePlex Q3FY20 - Active-Active Replication: Considerations for High Availability DP Q3FY20 There is a Right Way to Go "All-in" on the Cloud MPM Q3FY20 - What's New in SharePoint 2019 MPM Q3FY20 - Surviving Common Office 365 Security Pitfalls — Is Your On-Premises AD the Weakest Link? 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Migration to Exchange Online and Office 365: A Step-by-Step Guide pre-requisites, and require an uncommon depth of technical ability. Organizations migrating to Office 365 should evaluate the migration tools available from third-party vendors to streamline, simplify, and properly structure their migration activities across Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive. • Every organization operating under compliance requirements or who hold current email archives that need to be migrated without breaching archiving integrity should definitely get expert assistance from third-party migration vendors. The risk of being out of compliance, or breaking chain of custody in email archives is too high to do otherwise. ABOUT THIS WHITE PAPER This white paper was sponsored by Quest – information about the company is included at the end of this paper. A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO THE MIGRATION Organizations that have migrated to Office 365 have implemented various types of solutions and capabilities to support their use of the platform, as shown in Figure 2. Any organization with established business processes, current onpremises infrastructure, and historical data under management faces a significant planning exercise in evaluating the shift to Office 365. Figure 2 Solutions and Capabilities Implemented to Support Migration to Office 365 Among Organizations That Will Deploy Office 365 by 2017 Source: Osterman Research, Inc. STEP 1: FACE THE REALITIES OF MIGRATING TO OFFICE 365 Any organization with established business processes, current on-premises infrastructure, and historical data under management faces a significant planning exercise in evaluating the shift to Office 365, along with a set of discrete tasks in actually doing so. There are numerous critical decisions to make while planning the shift to Office 365—including how to achieve value from doing so, the approach to take, whether to involve an external consultancy, and the selection of third-party migration tools. ©2016 Osterman Research, Inc. 2 Migration to Exchange Online and Office 365: A Step-by-Step Guide The migration process itself requires the appropriate mindset, approach, and a set of technical skills, tools, and experiences that are not always readily available among an organization’s current IT professionals—or as some early adopters have discovered, even among external IT consultancies. Getting it right is important: if the migration process doesn’t work perfectly, staff won’t have the ability to read and respond to email, schedule meetings and book resources, and assistants won’t be able to manage their bosses calendar. Just thinking of Exchange at the moment, messaging is a mission-critical system for almost all organizations—so getting a migration right is critical. STEP 2: MAKE FOR HOW YOU WILL USE OFFICE 365 Office 365 provides an array of capabilities for enabling communication, collaboration, and compliance for organizations. An early task to complete in evaluating the shift to Office 365 is how your organization will make use of the capabilities on offer. Aspects include: • Whether to cherry-pick specific capabilities from Office 365 for use, such as Exchange Online or Exchange Online Archiving, or alternatively use most or all of the cloud services on offer. • Deciding whether to embrace a hybrid approach to specific capabilities, where some services are provided from Office 365 and complementary services are delivered through on-premises servers (for example, some Exchange mailboxes in Office 365 and others retained on-premises). A hybrid approach can be a short-term route for migrating to Office 365, or a long-term strategy for optimizing IT service delivery. • Once staff have new capabilities available from Office 365, how will you lead staff to the effective use of these new tools in their work? Getting business value from Office 365 requires creating new approaches to business processes enabled by new tools that streamline current processes by removing inefficiencies, creating innovation, or introducing greater effectiveness. The migration process itself requires the appropriate mindset, approach, and a set of technical skills, tools, and experiences that are not always readily available among an organization’s current IT professionals. In addition to deciding how to use Office 365, it is essential to know if there are other competing or complementary IT initiatives being undertaken at your organization that might impact the scope or timeline for a migration to Office 365, such as a refresh of end-user devices. Current litigation or in-progress evaluations of possible acquisition targets will also directly impact on the ability to move particular mailboxes to Exchange Online and your ability to migrate email archives. STEP 3: PROCURE THE OFFICE 365 PLAN THAT MAKES SENSE FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION Microsoft offers a number of plans for Office 365, with increasing levels of capability and service coverage. An organization that wants to use a hybrid configuration between on-premises servers and Office 365 must select a plan that supports Azure Active Directory to enable administration tasks and seamless identity management between the two environments. Other considerations in selecting a plan includes: • Organizations with a global footprint or strict data sovereignty requirements in some geographies need to decide between a single Office 365 tenant or the use of multiple tenants. While an organization can set up multiple cooperative tenants to comply with data sovereignty and address other practical issues, a multi-tenant approach comes with a range of complexities. • Organizations with fluctuating staff numbers over the year could choose to forego the slightly cheaper plans that require an annual commitment and instead sign up for a plan that only requires a monthly commitment. This allows an organization to optimize its cost commitment to Microsoft, but does require ©2016 Osterman Research, Inc. 3
