I could do with some help moving to Office 365?

Office 365 is one of Microsoft’s fastest growing products; Reliable, secure, easy to manage and available on all devices is just some of the marketing collateral that sits around this great cloud product. It does have its issues though… One thing I hear day to day as I speak with customers of all sizes is the complexity of moving from A to B (A being your current environment – B being Office 365).

The internet is filled with some useful and some very un-useful documents and blogs around how best to move to Office 365 and what you should bear in mind. This post should provide you with some key tips around the deployment and some resources I’ve used when deploying and supporting some customers of mine.

Moving the data –

The hard part, right? Moving the gigabytes and gigabytes of data you have is never going to be simple but there are some solutions.

-          Migration tools

o   SkyKick https://www.skykick.com/ : Automatic migration tool available to partners only so get in touch with a Microsoft partner: http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en- GB/companies/search?q=office%20365&fcrc=GBR

o   Migration Wiz https://www.migrationwiz.com/ : connect this tool with your environment and watch the data move across (costly but effective).

o   Office 365 Migration tool http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852447.aspx : A tool that can do the job, but that’s about it.

After the data is moved the rest is easy, well that’s what Microsoft say. A useful article I used when deploying was the trustee TechNet articles (wrote by the engineers that built the product – who better, right?) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852429.aspx

I’m extremely intrigued to hear how people are getting on with the migration, share your story and thoughts below.