Get your house in order before moving to Office 365
April 27, 2012
Contributed Article. Author: Michael Tweddle, Director of Product Management at Quest Software and Author of Office 365 Migration for Dummies
If you are seriously considering migrating to Office 365, it is important to weigh all of the pros and cons and understand exactly what you are getting into. One key thing to remember is that the cloud isn’t a product, it’s a service. This means there should be a shift in the way you look at your email and collaborations solutions. Not only will moving to a cloud-based solution such as Office 365 change how your users will use the service, but it will also have a big effect on what you need to do to prepare for your migration and how you manage the new environment after your migration project is over.
In the recently released Office 365 Migration for Dummies book, I state “Regardless of the deployment model, migrating to Office 365 is a multi-faceted decision making process requiring careful planning and preparation.” I can’t stress that enough – the key to a successful migration is preparation and using the right tool to migrate your users and data to the new platform. So, if you are serious about making the move to Office 365, please consider learning as much as possible about the new platform through analysis and reporting to create a pre-migration plan to ensure its success. In order to prepare properly I have a few tips that should help get you on your way.
Top 4 Ways to Prepare for a Cloud Migration
- Inventory your current environment
- Analyze how your assets are being used
- Identify unused assets
- Clean up the assets that you no longer need
The first is attaining a complete inventory of your current environment. A messaging infrastructure is made up of many assets: mail servers, mailboxes, accounts, mobile devices and shared resources such as public folders and shared or group mailboxes. Different servers may be assigned different roles or functions, and various third-party applications or services may depend on the current messaging infrastructure. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to know exactly what you have before you even begin a migration project.
Once you know what assets you have in your source environment, the next step is to determine how they are being used. Migrating to Office 365 or any new platform usually entails purchasing new hardware. Understanding the current utilization of your infrastructure will help you determine whether you are nearing capacity and should plan for additional hardware, or whether certain assets are currently underutilized and could be consolidated.
Then, you need to identify unused assets to minimize migration work and optimize your target environment. By identifying any assets in your source environment that are currently either totally unused or used only sporadically and evaluate whether they are required in the new environment.
Finally, it is time for clean-up where you remove the assets that you no longer need. Consider backing up or archiving old messaging data (mail, calendar items, contacts, posts, etc.) that might not need to be migrated to the new environment.
If that seems like a lot of work up front – it’s true, but completely necessary if you want to start out on the right foot in your new environment. There are software solutions available out there that could help you simplify and streamline the pre-migrating preparation.
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About the Author
With more than 13 years of experience working in all areas of Windows management and compliance, Michael Tweddle is the senior director of product management for Quest’s Active Directory and Exchange management and migration solutions. He is responsible for product direction, strategy and go-to-market activities for these solutions. Prior to this position, he managed architecture specialists in various Windows Management areas.
Prior to Quest, Michael worked for Exxon Mobil and Anadarko Petroleum. He earned a degree in management information systems from Texas Tech University, and a master’s degree in finance from St. Thomas University.