10 Things You Should Know Before Moving to Office 365

Knowing Starts Here…

Phone: (610) 717.0413 Email: info@metavistech.com www.metavistech.com

Steve Pogrebivsky, CEO MetaVis Technologies

1. The Advantages and Challenges of a Public Cloud

Office 365 is a SaaS (software as a service) offering, hosted by Microsoft. This is a public cloud service, so itcomes with a number of potential concerns: availability and security being the two biggest ones. Thebenefits to a SaaS offering like Office 365 are numerous, you pay a monthly subscription for your site andnothing more, you get most of the standard SharePoint features, and you can work with external partnersmuch more easily than an on premises SharePoint implementation. Plus your employees can workanytime, anywhere.

But you are playing by Microsoft’s rules, which means there are some things you can’t do – like install yourown custom solutions. And you have to trust that Microsoft will secure your content appropriately andhave your site available whenever you need it. It’s not unusual for SaaS services to become unavailable forperiods of time, so make sure you understand what Microsoft’s terms of service are and you can live withthem.

2. The Hard Costs: On Premises vs. Cloud

There’s a big cost to SharePoint on premises, including hardware and software – SharePoint is not exactlyan inexpensive option. Add to these costs, the resources required to maintain and administer SharePointand you can clearly see dollar signs in your eyes everywhere.

Office 365 is subscription based, so you pay a monthly fee to use it. There are different subscription levels,depending on your needs, so make sure you know what each level provides in terms of services.For example:

• Office 365 Small Business (up to 25 users): US$5.10/user/month• Office 365 Small Business Premium (up to 25 users): US$13.25/user/month• Office 365 Mid-Sized (up to 300 users): US$15.40/user/month – adds desktop Office apps• Office 365 Enterprise (3 different levels) ranging from $8.20 – $25.50/user/month

Each level gives you a few more things – it might be more space, desktop tools, Exchange Online,Enterprise social with Yammer, etc.. Note that all Office 365 subscriptions include a OneDrive for Businessaccount.

You’ve been thinking about it, moving to Office 365. You know it offersyou some great capabilities while helping reduce some costs, but youneed to convince management it’s the right move. There is a lot totake into consideration, and we can help. Here are the top 10 thingsthat you should know about moving to Office 365. Use these toexplain your recommendations to management.

Knowing Starts Here…

Phone: (610) 717.0413 Email: info@metavistech.com www.metavistech.com

3. Migrating Your Existing Content

It’s unlikely you are going to start your Office 365 site from scratch. It’s reasonable to assume you willhave a lot of content you will want to migrate into the new environment, which means you have someplanning to do.

I will strongly recommend that you don’t do a straight copy unless your environment is exactly the wayyou want it. It’s more likely you have some changes you want, or need, to implement. So take some timeto plan how the migration will occur and what tool you will use do it.

When you are selecting migration tools, take into consideration how fast the tool will work, how many(and what types) of changes you can do to your content during the migration process, and also whatobjects might not be supported through migration.

That’s right, there are some unsupported objects in Office 365 – like templates – that you will have tolook at and decide what to do with them.

Migration is not a simple process, so plan it carefully.

4. Backing Your Office 365 Content

Once you move your content to Office 365, you’ll need to employ a backup process. Microsoft does offera degree of backup and restore for Office 365, so take a look at what they offer out-of-the-box and decideif that’s enough for you.

More likely it won’t be and you will want to employ another solution for ensuring your data is backed upand protected outside of Office 365. It’s possible you might want to backup to another cloudenvironment, or you may want to backup to an on premises server. It’s also possible you might want todo local backups to your desktop for certain team sites, or site collections.

The key is to know what how often content will change, what content is the most critical to have localcopies of, and whether you are happy with incremental backups or need daily full backups.

5. Office 365 Security

Security is a major concern of every organization. You want to be sure your information is well protectedand accessible only to those who need it. When you plan your Office 365 environment think about the

Which brings me to point out the Exchange equation. Have you implemented Exchange on premises foremail? Then you might not want a version of Office 365 that includes Exchange. Or you might want tomigrate your Exchange to Office 365, eliminating those hardware, software and resource costs. But whathappens if you continue to use your on premises Exchange? How does that affect your Office 365subscription?

6. AdministrationEvery SharePoint implementation needs at least one Administrator. It’s important that you keep track of thesites and content added to your implementation to ensure:

Track the growth of content, both overall and per site/library

Track who uses content and who should have permission to use it.

Track how content is being used.

You need to determine what the best IA should be for Office 365, focusing on the content in yourorganization and how it’s used. Content is the driver of innovation for any organization today, so it’s reallyimportant to understand what you have, where it lives and how it’s being used.

And keep it mind this isn’t a one time deal, it’s something you need to monitor and measure and report onregularly. Your Office 365 will evolve as it’s used, so regular administration is critical.

Here are some tips that will help with your administration planning.

It’s important to understand that you don’t have full access to your Office 365 implementation like you dowith on premises SharePoint environment. Your administration rights are focused on creating and managingSite Collections, managing metadata, assigning site collection administrators, setting up access for partnersand other external parties, set up user profiles, and set up InfoPath Forms services (if you use it). As anadministrator you can monitor and manage the storage capabilities of Site Collections. What you can’t do ischange how the technical environment is set up, as Office 365 is a shared environment (SaaS), customizeSharePoint or do anything that has the potential to affect other customers. While Office 365 does offer agood deal of management capabilities, it does not provide you with all the tools you really need to manageyour tenancy properly.

7. Content located in other systemsIf you are like most organizations, I bet you have content located in more than one place. Sure you mighthave an on premises version of SharePoint, but I’ll bet some of your employees are also storing and sharingdocuments in Google Drive and DropBox. There’s likely even a ton of documents still maintained in fileshares.

You need a centralized content strategy. If that central location is going to be Office 365 moving forward,get your IA defined and then find the right tool to help you migrate content from all these disparatelocations into your Office 356 implementation.

You don’t have to move all your content to Office 365 though, only move the content you currently use,archive the rest.

Knowing Starts Here…content you have and how it’s created and shared. This will help you plan how to structure your sites andlibraries/lists. If there’s specific content you need to share with outside parties, such as partners, suppliers,agencies, etc., you’ll need think about where to place that content, what type of permissions to set on itand what kind of IRM policies will need to be applied. In addition, consider how DLP (data loss prevention)may be required, especially if the information you want stored in Office 365 is highly sensitive.

Check out some guidelines I put together for managing your Office 365 permissions.

8. Search – classification, taxonomy

Search is popular and well-used feature within all content management applications. Office 365 offerssearch administration and you can apply specific configurations to individual sites or site collections or tothe entire tenancy (which is the default).

There are some features with search that aren’t available on all or certain levels of subscriptions (advancedquery rules being one example), so make sure you look at those.

Things that you will have to consider prior to migrating center on your taxonomy. You should re-evaluatehow your content is organized and classified and take the time to plan how you really want it done in Office365. Making the changes during the migration is easier than moving all your content and trying to organizeit later on.

9. Collaboration vs. Cloud Storage (Team Sites vs. OneDrive)

Before you make the move to Office 365, ask yourself what you really need. Do you need a place to workand collaboration with a team of people? Or do you simply want a location in the Cloud to store and sharefiles?

Depending on your needs, you may not need the full functionality (and therefore cost) of Office 365, butthe simple file storage capabilities of OneDrive for Business. OneDrive for Business gives you the ability toco-author documents in real-time, create, view and edit documents online, share documents with peopleoutside your organization. You also have automatic versioning and history, a nice mobile app to useOneDrive on the go, and the ability to sync with the desktop- even when you are near your desktop.

OneDrive for Business is much cheaper than even the basic Office 365 small business account. It costs$2.50/user/month (it will go to $5/user at some point). That gives you 25GB of storage, plus you canpurchase extra storage for $0.20 per GB.

OneDrive also gives you a strong security support offering things such as auditing and reporting,SSO/ADFS/Directory sync support, multifactor authentication, built in compliance and more. If you’velooked at OneDrive and you really like it, but also want the advanced functionality offered in Office 365,your Office 365 account does comes with a OneDrive subscription for each licensed user.

OneDrive for Business makes sense if you only want a way to take your documents with you wherever yougo, and share them with others quickly. But if you are looking for email integration, more collaborationtools, including social networking, then you really have to consider Office 365 and the value you get fromOffice 365 Team Sites.

10. Customization

Knowing Starts Here…

Office 365 is a SaaS application, which means you share the environment with other organizations. Thismeans that if you want custom features, you can develop them directly within Office 365 – not like youwith SharePoint on premises. But Microsoft’s approach to customization has evolved a lot since therelease of SharePoint 2013 and Office 365.

Customization typically comes by way of third-party applications that connect into your environment (inthis case Office 365). Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager, Mark Kashman, gave us some great insight intothe Cloud App Model for Office 365 and SharePoint which should help you with your planning.

Knowing Starts Here…