Office 365′s a fantastic enabling product suite which can improve the way your business operates. However, as with all migrations, careful consideration before the event can save a world of pain after. Here at Blue Sky we’ve compiled a few pointers to help you start the journey. There’s quite a bit more to consider – we’re here to help when you’re ready!

Savings

Cost is one of the key motivators in facilitating a move to Office 365.  With the per-user subscription model and varied plans, against the cost of maintaining and upgrading your on-premise environment, there is certainly a compelling reason to consider a move to Office 365.

Availability

Using Office 365, where Microsoft host the service at their own datacentres, takes the onus off you having to manage and administer a servce locally.  This is particularly great if you are being faced with old legacy systems that require lots of care and attention.  If your on-premise environment ceased working, then everyone stopped working.  However, with Office 365, as long as local and remote users have an Internet connection, they can continue their work.

Planning

Careful planning and a clear definition of the goals to be achieved provide the basis for a successful move to Office 365.  Do you want to move everything into the cloud?  Have you an old Exchange environment that you want decommissioned?

With our help and expertise, we can help discuss and guide the move to Office 365 based upon your requirements.

Design decisions between on-premise vs. cloud

Unless you’re going for a brand new deployment of Exchange Online, then you’re going to be faced with a migration.

With an existing Exchange environment, this is going to involve a hybrid deployment, mixing both Exchange and Office 365 for email.  How long you maintain the hybrid environment depends on your organisation’s longer-term goals.  You may not want all mailboxes hosted in the cloud, for example, if some sites have poor Internet bandwidth, or you wish to maintain control over some mailboxes.

Ensure prerequisites are met for your deployment

Under our guidance, we can ascertain whether or not your current environment will facilitate your move to Office 365.  Where possible, we can then get your system up to spec ready for the Office 365 deployment.

Single Sign On and Active Directory Integration

Do you want SSO capabilities between Office 365 and your on-premise Active Directory environment?  The key benefit of this is to achieve a unified password management and password policy between your local AD and Office 365.

Third Party Tools and Applications

Do you have any 3^rd party tools and applications currently integrated with your existing infrastructure?  Do these work with Office 365 or are there equivalent versions within Office 365’s product offerings?