Office 365 Migration Planning

Editor's Notes

1. Working as a consultant focusing on MS and SharePoint most of my careerHad the opportunity to work with some of the best and brightest in SharePoint space, helping build SharePoint 2010
2. Providing a very high level overview of Office 365. Not Office 365 101 class so we are assuming everyone is at least familiar with what it is. We will just touch on this before getting into our methodology
3. This slide talks about the trends driving the future of productivity and what we are hearing from our customers. Use this slide to set the stage for the FOP conversation.Increasingly Challenging Environment Consumerization of ITInsecure, risky consumer-grade applications installed by enterprise usersDemand for popular capabilities (social networks, IM, blogging, mashups, etc.) at workSharing of enterprise data on public networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)Multigenerational workforce3 generations – Boomers (b.1946-1962), GenX (1963-1980), Millennials (b.1981-2000) with different workstyles and attitudes toward technology80 million Millennials in US, 3.6B worldwide – 4 million enter US workforce each yearBoomers deferring retirement, second careersRise of the CloudMain customer concerns: control, security – still questions about cloud in minds of some20% Of Businesses Will Own No IT Assets by 2012Most enterprises looking at hybrid cloud/on-premise deploymentsInfrastructure cost and complexityToo many systems/vendors in data centerAverage $1 B company maintains 48 disparate financial systemsComplicated by M&A activity, need to maintain legacy systemsDiverse and distributed workforceRemote workers – 84% of organizations have a remote workforceIncreasingly sophisticated mobile apps, mobile devicesIncreasing use of contingent staff, contractors, outsourcing
4. Here are some of the companies recognizing these trends and leveragingMicorosoft Online Services to meet demands! Some of the largest and well known organizations in the world are using MOS in some capacity.Hopefully most of you here are wanting to know how YOU get there
5. Below is a three phase approach to migrating to office 365We will drill down into each of the key activities of this methodology but let me walk you through them at a high levelPlan – Inventory, planning hardware, network, bandwidth, determining what you actually need/want in the cloudPrepare – Probably the largest of the phases, This phase is basically where you do any up front activities you can do without impacting day to day operations, preconfiguring, and building scripts, etc. Preparing for the actual migration or cutoverMigrate – The migrate phase when you actually pull the trigger and move into validation and support mode.The reason this approach works so well is that you can do a majority of the work before actually migrating, thus minimizing maintenance windows, end user impact, and risk.
6. Plan phase consists of the follow items. Now for the sake of time, we are going to focus on the core application acitivies here and will defer:Kickof meeting, Mobile, and communications plan until a later time.
7. Conduct bandwidth assessment Because you are taking a core set of likely existing IT services and branching them outside of your network, it is really important to have a good inventory of your network configurations. This is because firewalls, SSL certs, SSO, Federation all will impact various aspects of migration. Also, depending on what features you are deploying, your network and server usage patterns could significantly changePlan On-Premise Hardware Because of the all of the different options users have expecially with hybrid environments, on-premise servers may be requiredMail Enabled Applications Must be compatible with Exchange Web ServicesIdentify Mailbox Migration Co-existance or full cutovere Archiving and e-discovery storage management limitations, things like archive files, pst’s in the cloud
8. Plan to manage SharePoint Online. Also plan to maybe manage in two places.Plan sites and manage users Which sites are you going to migrate? What is the business case for migrating that site? Is the group distributed or not What branding does it need?Plan Content Metadata, content types How will navigation and search work Social features Keep in mind your limits (100gig, 300 site collections). If you did a good job with your site collections, you may be able to take good candidates (e.g. a giant swath of team sites and migrate). Otherwise as you stage in the migrate phase , you may need to re-partition some of your content.
9. Customizations Especially now, this takes a lot of planning. MS is opening up more and more with each release but you need to be careful to ensure you CAN deploy Be wary of 3rd party tools. Not all are certified to work in the Office 365Train MS has a good body of introductory videos, productivity hub, etc, are all pretty good. We recommend frequent formal and informal how tos and learning resources to be executed or launched frequently Monitor and maintain Storage should be closely monitored, especially initially Reporting is not fantastic as of yet but, auditing and other tools like google analytics can help you to get where you need to be.
10. For Lync, three big decisions you need to plan forWill you be able to connect to people outside your organization?Can you work with othere 3rd party IM productsHow can your users leverage Lync (Video Conferencing, Mac, Mobile, etc.)
11. Next lets talk about the prepare phase
12. First phase of the prepare phase is to configure infrastructure, Exchange, and mailboxes.There are nine steps to this phase which we will review with you now.Verify Domains Process in which MOS will verify against your domain registrarValidate Domain As part of this process you will need to add TXT or MX records to your registrar Once this is done and all setting have propagated you will go back to MOS portal and “Verify”Directory Cleanup Sync issues
13. Step 6, exchange coexistance is optional. You can do the cutover if you prefer and in that case, this is not required
14. Migrate mailboxesMigrating mail can take a while. From your planning you should have a good idea as to how long this will all takeMigrating can be done via Exchange in house migration tools or 3rd party tools depending on the circumstances
15. SharePoint out of all of these products is the fuzziest to migrate. This is because it is the most diverse product and different kinds of content.Migrate some content, need to have a the process in place for incrementals. Can migrate some content or pages ahead of time that won’t change. Frequently changing content may require a cutover during the migrate. At a minimum. You should have a plan, timeline, and approach all staged so you can “just do it” when it is time to migrate. For more complex environments, it may be good to set up a staging environment where you can test and vet all customizations.
16. Now we are all prepare, staged, and ready to go. Hopefully we have done enough pre-work to get up and running with relatively low risk and disruptions.
17. Migrate and sync exchangeSharePoint Execute the plan 3rd party tools can really help depending on your contstraints (e.g. Very limited department availability)Update DNS This is where you would set up your final routing so that requests are now put to your new environment.Configure Mobile Getting users all of the connectivity info for mobile accessValidate environment Execute test plans