Top 8 Ways to Prepare for an Office 365 Migration

I recently delivered a webinar for Valorem Consulting on preparing for Office 365 migrations.  We uploaded the video to YouTube for any of you who are interested.

The topics I cover are:

1. Get Good Help:  Know where to go for help - Microsoft phone support?  Online forums?  Maybe from a Microsoft Partner?  How do you know which are good?
2. Choose Your Migration Type: What's the right method for migrating from your system?  There are several that each have differing levels of capability and complexity.
3. Know Office 365's Requirements and Limits: You'll probably need to upgrade software or run Windows updates.  There are size limits on e-mails and storage as well.
4. Get Good Tools - Know what tools are at your disposal and will make your migration easier.
5. Document Everything - Make e-mail flow and network diagrams, write a summary of how your e-mail systems work, etc.
6. Know About the Cloud - Understand how using e-mail and services in the cloud differ from your legacy systems on-premises.  Understand how support is different as well.
7. Know What You Need - Ask good questions about what functions you need, how you manage it, etc.
8. Clean House - Choose what to migrate and clean up your data.

The webinar is over an hour long, so isn't for the faint of heart, but there's some really good information in there.

In the webinar I mention some resource links.  You can find them posted online at Free Online Resources for Planning and Migrating to Office 365.