If you’re planning to migrate to Office 365, one of your major concerns should be the user experience after the transition. This isn’t an application that’s used occasionally or one that’s so specialized users will accept its quirks; this is business software that everyone in the company uses on a daily basis. The migration plan needs to ensure users transition as successfully as your data. Take these steps to ensure that your users are able to work effectively and productively with Office 365:

1. Make sure users will be able to access Office 365 easily. Review your bandwidth and make sure you have adequate capacity to handle the network demand. It isn’t a bad idea to double-check that your network provider and internet service provider are living up to their service level agreements and delivering the capacity you’re paying for. You should also verify that network security won’t block user access, especially from remote locations.
2. Put monitoring tools in place. You’ll need effective network monitoring tools to investigate any performance degradation that impacts users. You’ll need to be able to measure latency, round-trip time, and data loss to investigate any problems. Because users can access Office 365 on any platform, from any location, you should use tools that let you monitor performance on devices, not just network traffic.
3. Don’t neglect email archives. While people work with email every day, they don’t work with just today’s emails. Archived emails are important as well, and you need to migrate those archives and make accessing them easy for users as part of your Office 365 migration.
4. Separate Office 365 traffic from business critical applications. Because the Office 365 components like email are core to business operations and heavily used, they generate a lot of network traffic. Design your network to separate that traffic from other business critical applications to ensure they aren’t impacted.
5. Include user training. You may think that the applications in Office 365 are familiar to users so they’ll know what to do with it. This is often not true. Users need to be taught where to find tools and how they can use them together to work collaboratively and effectively.

Prescient Solutions is a Microsoft Partner experienced with all Microsoft products. Our IT consulting and managed services help companies in the Chicago and Schaumburg areas leverage IT to grow their businesses. Contact us to learn how to make your transition to Office 365 a great experience for your technology team and your business end users.