Published on April 13th, 2022
3 min read
Like many projects, migrating into Microsoft 365 requires a structured approach.
You need to define your goals very clearly before you start configuring tenants, creating sites and moving content. If you don't, you'll end up solving problems which don't exist, with cost and effort you could have applied where it's really needed.
Read on for a summary.
When you identify specific reasons for migrating, based on pain points reported by your users, you're setting yourself up to deliver the wins people are eagerly anticipating.
Be specific about these points, so you can be specific when you deliver on them.
When people are used to an on-premises environment, a few examples are:
Having a firm list of pain points to be addressed enables you to define which of the M365 components/apps you need to implement, and in what order of priority.
In some instances you may find that solutions sound great, but may not make sense immediately because of a combination of factors such as timing, systems integration complexity, and needing to deliver ROI on existing investment. Park these for phase 2.
You can gradually adopt the various Microsoft 365 apps to deliver your planned solutions, but you need at least a tenant with Azure AD as an identity provider before your users can access any of the services.
Broadly speaking, your basics will be:
Once your basic cloud presence is in place, you can start accessing the myriad of M365 apps available, assess and test functionality, and plan functionality and content migration.
In most scenarios, content is migrated in tranches over several weeks or months. You'll need to:
Testing your migration process by running a pilot with a complex portion of content is strongly advisable.
Running a pilot will help you discover issues you'll encounter in your production migration, such as:
Use the knowledge you've gained in your pilot phase to create a thorough production migration plan which takes into account:
Your role does not end once users start interacting with content in its shiny, new location.
To ensure that you fully solve the pain points identified in step 1, you need to keep lines of communication open and make the adoption of a new way of working as easy as possible.
Download our content migration whitepaper.
You'll learn how to successfully migrate your organisation's content to the Microsoft 365 cloud with a combination of planning and technical best practices.
Need assistance urgently? We can help.
Want to talk about how we can help?Drop us a message in our chat widget and we'll get back to you soon!
