If your business has decided to make the move to Microsoft 365, it is vital that you and your team plan and prepare each step down to the smallest detail. These plans need to include recognizing and detecting each target, who will be accountable for each target, and the timeline that each target is achieved in.
Microsoft itself supports this move by offering the Deployment Planning Checklist for Microsoft 365. The aim of this checklist is to support companies manage, prepare, and plan for a migration to Microsoft 365.
The Deployment Planning Checklist for Microsoft 365 is adjustable to any of your business’s needs and consists of these five objectives:
Establish your Deployment Goals. Work with internal and external stakeholders to define goals such as scope and timeline, project tracking and success criteria.
Catalogue your existing environment and make crucial deployment decisions. Analyse your current environment and gather information such as the number of users’ accounts, number, and size of mailboxes, info on file storage locations, info on network settings, and any apps that are integrated with current systems.
Correct any deployment blockers. Utilizing the tools and guidance Microsoft has supplied, solve any blocking issues that might arise in areas such as Active Directory, Active Directory Rights Management Services, making sure your data, network and your clients are ready to be migrated.
Establish Microsoft 365 services to run for your organization. Organise and set up your company’s Microsoft 365 subscription by authenticating the domains you want to use, setting up application settings such as email, file storage, etc. Do not forget to evaluate the deployment and speak to users about upcoming changes first!
Roll out to your users. Set up your user accounts and mailboxes by adding your users and allocating them the correct licenses, migrate the data, confirm functionality, modify any client systems so they link to Microsoft 365, and let your users know when they can start using the new system.
Making this move to Microsoft 365 and any subsequent data migrations often seems like a huge undertaking therefore many businesses are unsure where and how to begin.
This is where a complete migration platform like Casper365 comes in. Casper365 scans your site collections and provides you with a detailed report showing where the data is held, when it was last updated, and which users have access, helping you to understand what to include in your migration plan. It also helps you understand your sensitivity filters, providing full governance and access control during your migration. Plus, it produces a pre-migration report that can be used for sign-off, if required.
Once the pre-migration is signed off, the job can be scheduled, and the migration can happen. When completed, a post-migration report is created to update you with the result: what migrated successfully, if any issues arose and how they were resolved.
This not only allows you to use that data for communication to other departments, but it also provides a complete audit trail as all data is uploaded to a site collection on your tenant. This means in a year from now when someone asks a question relating to that data, you have it on record.
Add to this that with Casper365 you have the full support of the expert Business Cloud Integration team behind you ready to answer any questions or help you move forward with best practices.
Choosing the right tool helps to propel your migration project and create a successful migration that gets your whole organisation to value faster.