Migrating To Office 365: Drive Effective Use And Achieve Business Value

Once you have migrated to Office 365, the ongoing challenge is to drive effective use and achieve business value through incorporating appropriate Office 365 capabilities into day-to-day work. An exhaustive treatment of driving effective use and achieving business value is beyond the scope of this step-by-step paper, but key aspects include:

Gain Active Senior Executive Support 

Senior executives should be making use of appropriate Office 365 capabilities in their work, including sharing documents, managing executive meetings, and providing updates on organizational performance and direction through blogging or video briefings (using Office 365 Video). Provide mentoring to executives to help them through the transition to Office 365, as they will set a vital precedent for staff across the firm to do likewise.

Develop Departmental Champions 

Identify people across your organization who can become a local champion for the use of Office 365 in departmental activities. Provide special training opportunities for them to explore the possibilities with Office 365, as well as support for bringing new work activities to life in Office 365.

Provide User Training 

Some organizations find their users do not need any training to take advantage of Office 365, and that is likely to be true when users have previously experienced similar systems at other organizations. However, if that is not true of your organization, then some user training to explain why Office 365 is being used and how it is best used by individuals and teams across your firm will go a long way to aligning usage with intent.

Help Users Overcome Problems 

Users will face problems in using Office 365, and will need help in addressing these in a timely manner. Whether it is getting Outlook to connect to Exchange Online, troubleshooting a synchronization problem in OneDrive for Business, or identifying when to use OneDrive for Business versus a SharePoint team site, left unaddressed these questions will derail the effectiveness of your deployment. Provide appropriate help channels to mitigate this risk.

Retire Outdated Equipment 

In moving to Office 365 it is likely you now have excess and redundant servers on hand. Ensure they are properly decommissioned so you can cease future licensing payments.

Migrating to Office 365 can be a major undertaking for most companies, involving months of preparation, planning, mitigating and more. For IT admins taking this on for the first time, there is a steep learning curve. The Osterman Research-based analyst report presents a step-by-step guide for shifting to Office 365 to ensure a smooth migration for business.