You don't switch to the Cloud just by clicking a button. If migrating to online messaging – which is often the first step in a SaaS project – migrating to Office 365 involves transferring content and collaborative applications. It is then essential to rethink the tools and to look at the data so that both can be migrated smoothly with Microsoft Consulting firm.
And this for two reasons. On the one hand to adapt them to the Cloud. On the other hand to be able to definitively abandon the existing on site – unless you want to keep a hybrid architecture for one reason or another – an existing one which is too often complicated, cumbersome and above all expensive.
With a well-prepared migration plan, the transition can nevertheless be done without (too much) pain for users, administrators or developers.
Switching to Office 365 is first and foremost an opportunity to consolidate your collaborative and file sharing tools. Many companies have a string of them, each for a particular aspect in the document management process. This multitude creates what is called application fatigue (or App Fatigue), employees are tired of the tools and do not use them anymore or not entirely. Especially since part of what already exists may no longer be relevant at all with changes in usage.
Office 365, in addition to being very scalable ( both to adapt to increases in workloads and decreases ), can perfectly consolidate resources that are scattered within on-premises or cloud platforms: SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive or project management apps like Huddle or Basecamp.
Another argument in favor of a migration is the end of the traditional burden on IT of updates, version changes and security patches. With public SaaS, all of these tedious tasks are handled by Microsoft. IT can focus on business objectives rather than configuration issues and backward compatibility of deployments with customizations from in-house developments.
But there are also obstacles to overcome, some of which could give you a headache.
The first challenge comes from the fact that Office 365 can consolidate the tools but that it also offers a host of them. Not always easy to find. Nor to train users. Second project, the Cloud makes it possible to offload update tasks, but these updates have accelerated drastically. In the past, new features – at least the most important ones – arrived with major releases, every one to two years. With the cloud, these features are delivered continuously. The tools evolve every two months, or even every month. This is not without posing user training problems with Al Rafay Consulting illinois.
Office 365 also has a “rich problem”. The multitude of tools available in the subscription inevitably creates overlap between applications. This generates confusion for a migration: an existing on-site can have several possible “Cloud destinations”.
The thing is not made easier by Microsoft. The publisher has not really published official recommendations on which SaaS tool for which type of content or collaborative scenario. Nor did it clearly end or identify overlaps between its offerings, such as redundancies between Outlook Groups and certain Yammer features for group chat.
A clear mapping is therefore essential on the project manager side, otherwise you will get lost on the way. Some migration tools can help by providing recommendations on which target technologies to choose for which on-premises application, based on automated content and legacy assessments.
It can be daunting to consider a complete migration from multiple systems, especially when the legacy has terabytes or petabytes of content that no employee is familiar with. In the past, this challenge has often resulted in partial migrations, with legacy systems not being completely shut down. This can lead to considerable expense and understandable resistance from users for yet another tool (“one more tool!”) to learn and add to their daily routines.
For example, many companies have suffered from the disadvantages of migrating to SharePoint (poorly documented sites, scattering of content and applications) with the key to Shadow IT - with Box, Dropbox and Google Drive.
In any case, your team will have to emphasize – by demonstrating it with A + B – that migrating to Office 365 makes it possible to have simpler tools than the existing ones with interfaces similar to the best current consumer tools.
Here again, migration tools can reduce the difficulty by generating exhaustive inventories of the resources already deployed, accompanied by recommendations. Some even use Office 365 to manage the migration process, which is an example of a concrete operational implementation of Office 365 – which, by the way, helps to show the relevance of the tool to the migration team and participants ( in the broad sense) to migration.
The best thing to do, if these challenges seem too big for you to handle internally, might be to get an outside assessment and recommendation of migration services from consultants or a Microsoft representative. Depending on the size of your transfer, Microsoft will help you directly or direct you to the right partner, which in both cases reduces problems - or in any case does not underestimate them.