how to really screw up your office 365 migration

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How to really screw up your Office 365 Migration Of course you don’t want to, but many businesses make a total mess of their migration to Office

365. It should be simple, and if you’ve only got 20 users and a small volume of data it can be.

But most migrations we come across fail to deliver the promised benefits. Other independent

research suggests that 72% of Office 365 migrations of over 200 users fail to deliver significant

benefits whereas those “properly” migrated save significant cost and dramatically increase

efficiency.

With this background, here are the six top mistakes that will really screw up your Office 365

migration:

More haste, less speed

Whilst this is somewhat of a cliché its meaning rings true when it comes to large scale migrations

and the changes they bring to your organisation. There are roughly 50 steps to follow to an Office

365 migration and activation, and they are not all easy. Some administrators will have a wider

breadth of knowledge than others setting up – for example setting SPF records is new to a lot of

people. Typically, younger administrators that have been with the same company for their entire

career cycle may have only worked with a single version of Exchange and may have never performed

a migration. So whilst the day-to-day, Business as Usual service is fine, managing a large scale and

fundamental change can be extremely nerve-racking, especially as there is a lot of new terminology

to get to grips with.

Our top tip is to use the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant, which can give you all the steps

needed to perform your migration. Remember to do a test migration first if you are considering

doing it yourself, however!

Up for adoption?

We have found that the adoption work for end users is sometimes pushed to one side, or not very

well handled, as it’s not part of the day to day routine. It's ok to send out a pdf with the basics of

how the system will work before migrating but really you need to engage with the end users site-

wide to gauge sentiments and ensure that adoption isn't a "hair loss situation".

Depending on how many departments you have, and how many stakeholders are involved you may

want to go whole hog and hold seminars for each group of people. These will not only help you

educate the various groups and people involved but will allow you to gain valuable insights as to the

users’ feelings and concerns about moving to the new system. It is extremely hard to hold a seminar

by yourself though, you will need to have a colleague write questions and details down for you

whilst you focus on presenting and answering questions.

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When we helped hold adoption and technical seminars for a major London University (around

25,000 users) it was imperative for them to consider using the latest cloud technology for their

students and staff to enhance the learning experience, but it was also vital to get a consensus

amongst the different departments as to when/if they should move to the cloud. Don't be afraid to

really simplify things down for your users too, you know how to do the simple "assumed" easy things

like reset a password, they may not. As you may well be aware!

Document libraries rationalisation

Probably the most annoying job in the world unless you are a librarian or have OCD. In the case of

SMEs there is often an existing document library, but we have rarely seen one that is well organised,

let alone one that is prepared with OneDrive for Business in mind. There are a few things you need

to think about before starting to migrate any data to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.

What's that you say? OneDrive for Business? Yes in Office 365 organisational accounts you get a

version of SharePoint called OneDrive for Business with 1TB of space. We tend to think of it as a

personal storage space however; it is also a lot easier to share documents and folders with external

users using OneDrive for Business as opposed to SharePoint. With OneDrive for Business you don't

have to set up a user access structure as you do with sites in SharePoint. In SharePoint you need to

understand three things relating to this:

1. SharePoint groups

2. Permission levels

3. Permissions inheritance and site structure

Whilst this can be achieved in OneDrive for Business you can share a folder very easily to an email

address (must have Office 365, or a Microsoft email like Hotmail) without having to worry too much

about what else they might be able to access.

Back to the topic at hand. So, those things you need to know:

If you intend users to sync files to their computer using the OneDrive for Business app

there is a 5000 item (that’s files + folders) sync limit per library. This can be perpetually

annoying if not considered in advance. For example libraries that will get used a lot will

fill up quickly. Be sure to create a structure which allows files to be archived easily.

Find out the overall size of the data which is to be moved. If the standard SharePoint

Online (SPO) can't handle it admins can buy more space by the TB. Be aware that there

is a 100Gb limit on site collections though.

There is also a limit of 5 million items within a document library. Unlikely as that is to

hit.

Check the existing depth of the file structure. If you exceed 260 characters in the path

name in SPO you will hit trouble.






Check for invalid characters like $, these files will not upload. No need to drive yourself

crazy checking by hand though. There is a PowerShell script which checks for invalid

files and characters in files and folders, and for the maximum URL length. This script will

also allow you to fix invalid characters and file extensions for you. SharePrep is another

tool which can help analyse the files. There are also migration tools that will move the

data for you but you need to check the above upfront.

Check what the largest files are and if possible put them to one side to upload last.

Treesize is an obvious tool to use for this sort of analysis.

If there is content not in use any more consider long term deep storage, perhaps on

Azure Backup.

We tend to arrange libraries by department, it makes the most sense in the long run.

You probably already know this but worth reminding you. Arrange the file structure

before you upload the data. You can't drag and drop files in SharePoint unless they are

synced to OneDrive for Business

We prefer to organise all the data first, then run the checks, then use OneDrive for Business to sync

the libraries we have created to the computer (the one with the files on), then move the data in to

the relevant folders/synced libraries for automatic upload.

Cutover or Staged Migration If you don’t decide on your migration type, Cutover or Staged, you will run in to trouble pretty

quickly when it comes to mailbox migration. Microsoft provide this advice:

“You can’t use a staged migration to migrate Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2013 mailboxes to

Exchange Online. If you have fewer than 2,000 Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2013 mailboxes in your

organization, you can use a cutover Exchange migration. To migrate more than 2,000 Exchange 2010

or Exchange 2013 mailboxes, you have to implement an Exchange hybrid deployment.”

There are several ways to migrate the mailboxes:

Manual Migration - Migrating the mailboxes manually involves saving.pst files, or adding

the new accounts in Outlook, and dragging-and-dropping. Extremely labour intensive!

Use MS Migration Tools – Office 365 does have some built in tools for migrating the

mailboxes, they are fine but do have limitations, for example the built in tool cannot

migrate FROM office365

Use 3rd party Migration Tools such as BitTitan or Skykick. 3rd party tools are much more

flexible, but there is a per-mailbox cost, and depending on the tool, data may pass though

the 3rd party’s server.

One very useful feature of BitTitan is that it does Office 365 to Office 365 (organisation to

organisation) migrations, the Microsoft built in tool doesn’t do this. Whilst moving organisational

accounts is a rare occurrence it does happen, for example during business divestment.


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Third party tools

You won’t be able to use any third party tools that require installation to the exchange server. You

will have to give up a bit of control! One obvious example of this is your anti-spam software which

you have studiously been tweaking for years. In the case of that software you will need to switch to

Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and start tweaking again…probably time to screenshot those

settings!

Domain Providers to avoid Some domain providers should be avoided like the plague. You need to be able to create SRV

records so make sure your host is able to do that or you will end up with greatly reduced

functionality to your Office 365 instance. If you were to use 1&1 for example they do not provide the

functionality to set up SRV records which means that Skype for Business will not work…which is

pretty darn important! We always use Evohosting as they have a good breadth of technical

knowledge and pretty fast support should you ever need it but there are other hosts out there who

can help with this.


how to really screw up your office 365 migration

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