Have you started out on your migration to Office 365 but haven\u2019t managed to migrate all your mailboxes to Exchange Online?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Everyone is working from home and your resources are more stretched than ever before.\u00a0 Should you hold the project, or give it a firm push to get it completed so your whole team can take advantage of the benefits Office 365 will bring?<\/p>\n
You\u2019re keen to push ahead \u2013 the benefits of Office 365 in this situation are great, but how do we persuade the business and what about the risks?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with the risks and objections:<\/p>\n
a.\u00a0 \u201cIt will be hard to support users when they\u2019re working at home\u201d \u2013 hybrid migrations require very little user interaction so long as they\u2019re running an up to date Outlook client. No new Outlook profile, no mailbox re-sync and therefore very little overhead.<\/p>\n
b.\u00a0 \u201cUsers don\u2019t have modern Office apps installed\u201d<\/p>\n
a.\u00a0 They have the power – given the right licenses and a bit of encouragement they can download Office desktop apps from the Office 365 Portal for themselves \u2013 Microsoft will even configure them for you.<\/p>\n
b.\u00a0 If that\u2019s no go – have you tried Office on the web recently? Outlook and the other Office Online apps are much more usable in 2020 than they ever have been before, in some cases the features come to the browser versions even before the desktop apps.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n c.\u00a0 \u201cThey won\u2019t know how it works.\u201d Engagement is everything \u2013 get them excited, provide some support but most of all – give them ways to help themselves.\u00a0 There are now some great user engagement tools which provide a personalised pathway for your colleagues to show them new skills based on the skills they\u2019re already using in Office 365 \u2013 and give them awards and badges to recognise their achievements.\u00a0 Talk to Insentra for more information about how.<\/p>\n On the plus side, there are several drivers but one of the greatest is of course Microsoft Teams<\/strong>.\u00a0 Teams I hear you say, but I can use Teams already and Microsoft have offered it to me for free.\u00a0 However, there\u2019s a hitch.<\/p>\n Earlier versions of Exchange (prior to Exchange 2016 CU3) will not allow users to view the Calendar or create meetings in Teams.\u00a0 This includes all versions of Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2010 and is because Teams meetings are reliant on the Autodiscover v2 feature which was only introduced for Exchange 2016.<\/p>\n Exchange 2013 does allow some interop with Teams in Office 365 as it does support Hybrid Modern Authentication using OAUTH2 functionality is limited for hybrid users.<\/p>\n Therefore, unless you already have Exchange 2016 running in your Hybrid environment, users whose mailboxes are still on-premises won\u2019t be able to use one of the most useful Teams features \u2013 Calendar\/ Meetings.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, the good news is that as soon as a user\u2019s mailbox is migrated these important features do become available and for many organisations, this in itself is enough motivation to keep the migration moving and reap the full benefits of migrating users to Office 365.<\/p>\n If you need more support for your story consider people being able to work with OneDrive to store, share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations with other remote colleagues using co-authoring.<\/p>\n Consider all the Office 365 mobile apps which allow remote workers to share their parenting responsibilities while also keeping in touch with the workplace.<\/p>\n And finally, consider the reduced bandwidth needed to support remote users coming back into your organisation via your VPN or other gateways in order to access email etc.\u00a0 Microsoft\u2019s global Front Doors to Office 365 will steer them to the nearest connection into Microsoft\u2019s network to provide the best user experience for people working at home.<\/p>\n So, in short don\u2019t stop migrating just because your workplace has suddenly upped sticks and started working from home.\u00a0 The initial rush will settle down and now you\u2019re also working at home, you won\u2019t have (the same) people tapping you on the shoulder every few minutes.\u00a0 The driving forces which motivated a move to Office 365 are now 10x stronger so talk to your partner and IT team to refresh your plan and keep pushing on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you started out on your migration to Office 365 but haven\u2019t managed to migrate all your mailboxes to Exchange Online?\u00a0 Everyone is working from home and your resources are more stretched than ever before.\u00a0 Should you hold the project, or give it a firm push to get it completed so your whole team can… Continue reading The World is Suddenly in Chaos and You're Half-way Into Your Migration To Office 365 – Do You Stick or Twist?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":94,"featured_media":1475,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-workplace","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/94"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22375,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474\/revisions\/22375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}OOPS<\/h3>\n
AND ANOTHER THING\u2026<\/h3>\n
KEEP GOING<\/h3>\n