Migrating to Office 365

OK, you’ve watched the cool videos from Microsoft, read review after review about the merits of Office 365 for Education, and decided it’s just what the doctor ordered for your school’s ailing IT infrastructure. And it's time to act on that New Years Resolution of improving your school.

Now what?

Fair question. Regardless of the current state of affairs in your school, you will need to manage this migration in an orderly and methodical fashion. This, most likely, will involve a weekend, holiday, or other day off for your staff in order to minimize the inconvenience.

There are three major components of Office 365 for Education solution which you will address in this migration. In order of most to least difficult difficult to migrate, at a typical school, they are:

1.       Email - Hosted Microsoft Exchange
2.       Lync – Unified Communications
3.       SharePoint – Team and Public Websites

This is also the order in which I would recommend the migration or setup occurs. And please note, this is not a technical support document, but an overview of the process. If you are not comfortable with the subject matter at hand, you’ll want to get some help.

Practically speaking, the only real migration is email, as the other services generally do not yet exist.  Most everyone already has an email account. The closest thing to unified communications in organizations without Lync is texting from a cell phone or other mobile device. And the starting point for a SharePoint migration is normally a Team site for each organization in your school and a document library. Neither of these is difficult to setup, once you have done the harder task of designing how you want to organize your intellectual goodies.

One final thought before we dive in. It is very important that you have full buy in and the moral (and organizational) authority to do this. Change is difficult and there will be resistance. Furthermore, unless you have made a persuasive case as to the benefits that will flow to each of your end users, they may not follow your lead. In my experience most migrations spend 80-90% of the energy on the technical process and 10-20% (or less) on staff introduction, orientation, and training. Be wise and considerate.

OK, so let’s get started with a few generalities in the administrators control panel. There are several basic setup tasks that are not covered by the clever wizards that Microsoft provides. These steps can be done without impacting your users.

1.       Select the right licensing Plan and purchase sufficient licenses for your organization. (This is a bit tricky because most of you will select the A2 Plan for Staff and Students, which is free; but you still have to add it to the shopping cart and checkout).

2.       Add all of your users to the correct domain name to eliminate having the convoluted default domain name of you@yourschool.onmicrosoft.com . If you have not yet obtained a domain name from Godaddy, Network Solutions, or another registrar – STOP and do so, then follow instructions on how to verify that domain name so it is available within the administrators control panel. (Note: we recommend different domain names for staff and students)

Email

The general idea with most technology migrations is to establish the new solution while keeping the old one intact to the extent possible. Then we do a cutover at a minimally impactful time (weekend, holiday, etc.) while keeping the old system available for fallback should the migration fail. Finally we have a period of validation where we confirm the new system is working and then at an appropriate time deactivate the old.

If you do this properly, you will not lose any email and the change will be mostly transparent. If you plan and execute poorly, you will have an email outage and could lose important messages permanently.

Your email migration begins with the modification of Domain Name Records at your Domain Name Registrar. So when you are ready, head on over to Godaddy, Network Solutions, or your registrar and make the necessary zone file modifications. If you are not 100% sure how to do this, get assistance. This is the most crucial step for a successful migration. It only takes a moment to modify the actual Domain Record, but it can take up to 72 hours for those changes to distribute to the right places – so be sure you know what you are doing.

While DNS changes are propagating throughout the World Wide Web, you can start gathering the data from each of your users email accounts. The primary data you are gathering is email, but don’t forget the contacts. You should know which email accounts are most important to your organization and which users actually engage in email messaging, focus your priorities accordingly. Hint: I would probably start with the principal.

Your email migration will take different paths depending on three key factors:

1.       The type of email server in use – commercial or private, IMAP, POP3, Exchange, etc.

2.       The degree to which personal and school email is comingled
3.       The method by which your users currently access their email – webmail l or Outlook

Note: This is not technical support article on the particulars of exporting and then importing your email, contacts, notes, etc. But in one way or another, you will have to export email from each user’s old account into their new account if you wish to retain existing messages. This process gets a little tricky if your users are on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. as these email accounts are their personal property and you can’t do this without their permission (as demonstrated by a username and password).

For the end user, email migration begins when you deliver the welcome message and temporary passcode to them. This temporary passcode is generated when you create a new user, but you can (and probably should) delay delivering this information to the user until you are ready to start the migration.

Write in big bold letters the following URL on any migration documents (email or paper) you hand out.

https://portal.microsoftonline.com

This URL is the sole place to acquire, modify, and access all of the Office 365 services. We will discover shortcuts to the various services later, but this single URL is vitally important. Before a user can do anything with the Office 365 for Education system, they will need to visit this URL and change the temporary password issued at the creation of their account, to a permanent one that ONLY they should know.

Once logged into the Office 365 for Education Portal, the Outlook link at the top of the screen will take your users to their new email account. And if you have managed this migration well, all of their messages and contacts will be waiting for them.

For some of your users, the Outlook Web Access experience will be all they desire. And while there is nothing wrong with using Outlook Web Access, they may enjoy a much more productive email experience if you install Outlook on their main desktop. For more information about Outlook on the Desktop vs. Outlook Web Access go here.

At this point, your Microsoft Exchange email hosted on the Office 365 for Education is setup. Your users can now access it from any browser capable device or email enabled phone or tablet.

Lync and SharePoint

As mentioned at the outset of this article, there is generally not a migration involved with Lync and SharePoint services within Office 365. For Lync it really boils down to getting your users to try it. We have literally had schools almost shut down when the staff had that ‘ahah’ moment regarding Lync. They were so excited to try all of the cool features, like instant video chat that they almost forgot to teach their classes.

With Lync, you can communicate with your team using a variety of methods all based upon an indication of presence or availability. These methods include text, voice calls, video calls, desktop sharing and file sharing, and of course email. Lync has the ability to transform the communication within organizations that utilize it wisely.

Likewise, SharePoint is a very transformational technology, but it requires a serious commitment to train and develop the system to the advantage of your organization. Watch for a series of articles about SharePoint over the next few weeks.

Summary

Implementing Office 365 for Education can be very straightforward for schools with chaotic or non-existent informational technology infrastructure. On the other hand it can be fairly complex for schools that have significant on premises facilities and resources in place. At either end of the spectrum, Office 365 provides a robust communication and collaboration platform that requires no hardware or no administrative staff onsite. The business case for Office 365 for Education is compelling and we recommend it enthusiastically.