Switching to Office 365 shouldn’t be painful, but it can be challenging. Make the transition easier by taking time to think about these Office 365 adoption challenges before you begin:

1.   How will end users work with Office 365?

Ultimately Office 365 is intended to support and enhance your employees’ ability to collaborate, but this won’t happen automatically. Make sure you train users in the differences between Office 365 and your on-premises solution, including differences in the software, interacting with external users, and accessing resources from mobile devices.

2.   Do all employees need to transition?

It’s easiest when everybody in the company is using the same tools, but there are sometimes good reasons to keep some employees using on-premises software. Implementing an effective hybrid approach requires enabling single sign-on via federation services to simplify identity management.

3.   Do you have the bandwidth for an efficient transition?

If you have a large volume of data, migrating from on-premises to Office 365 can take a significant amount of time. You can cut this down by temporarily purchasing additional bandwidth and by using migration tools that make it easier to completely move mail before transitioning users.

4.   Should you lift and shift or rearchitect?

The push to complete the migration to Office 365 as quickly as possible makes lifting and shifting seem like the sensible approach to take. However, this limits your ability to take advantage of newer features available in the online versions of applications. Be sure to do an actual evaluation of your migration strategy to make sure you’re positioned well for the long term as well as the short term.

5.   How will you cope with Office 365 outages?

As a cloud-based service, Office 365 is highly reliable, but downtime is still possible. You may wish to have other tools available to support business functions in the rare event of an outage.

6.   How will you monitor security?

Office 365 is a secure environment, but as with all cloud services, you are ultimately responsible for the security of your data. Develop a plan for implementing access controls and monitoring system behavior in order to minimize security risks.

7.   Do you need to customize your Office 365 environment?

One big benefit of Office 365 is the comprehensive level of functionality out of the box. However, you may need to make customizations to make Office 365 best fit your business needs. Make this determination before your migration so you aren’t surprised to find out you need to make changes.

Prescient Solutions provides Office 365 support that will help you plan your migration strategy, execute the migration process, and support your Office 365 infrastructure after migration is complete. Contact us for help thinking through your Office 365 requirements and successfully making the transition to the cloud.