If you are about to approach an enterprise Office 365 migration project, you will know that a complex journey lies ahead.
Whether you are migrating just your email, fully adopting all of the Office 365 cloud tools, or moving to a hybrid environment, you will need to meticulously plan every aspect of project delivery. You must also coordinate multiple resources across multiple teams, liaise with your businesses, communicate with your end users and ensure that thousands of administrative tasks are completed on schedule.
It’s no wonder that so many Office 365 migration projects run over time and budget. This is why you need a central command and control tool from which to coordinate your efforts. With Dashworks, you get everything an Office 365 migration project manager could need in one box.
Dashworks seamlessly connects to your existing repositories for your critical project data. Using our certified connectors to tools like Active Directory and Exchange, your information is collated in minutes and aggregated into the central data warehouse. Additional data is the gleaned from email archive systems, mobile device inventory, PC software inventory (e.g. installed Outlook version), instant messaging systems, shared drives, telephony and even Notes/SharePoint applications. Organizational data is then layered on to add locations and departments. Finally, custom fields are applied so that a full set of project baseline data is available. Where connectors are used, this data will refresh on the schedule you define (usually nightly).
Once we have your data, the next step is to check the quality and remove the things you don’t care about. This means identifying mailboxes, users, file structures and devices that are not applicable for the project and ensuring that your locations contain the right number of users. From here, we can hook into tools like Dell Migration Manager, Binary Tree and Archive 360 to understand what should be in and out of scope, and where the biggest migration hurdles may surface.
Now you tell Dashworks how you want to manage your Office 365 migration project. Create your migration paths (e.g. shared mailboxes vs personal mailboxes), your applications (public folder and shared drives), the tasks you want to track, your groups and deployment teams, the emails you want to send, and the configuration of the self-service portal. This project configuration is your blueprint for managing Office 365 migration.
This step moves the project into action. Your mailboxes, applications and devices inherit the default readiness status, and groups can be analyzed for delegation, size of migration, mobile device impact, file system complexity and archive impact. Schedulers can begin their work, and reports extracted to initiate key activities such as availability of new infrastructure, synchronization status of mailbox, calendar, file content and readiness of any associated SharePoint applications. It is here that your Office 365 project workload begins to take shape.
Your project resources are now moving things forward to get the mailboxes, users and applications / file systems to a green status. Emails are triggered to your end users, and further data is validated and rationalized through the self-service portal including public folder, SharePoint site and mailbox delegation requirements. Dashboards display real-time progress and what is holding up the most migrations. At this point your project engine is pumping, and you are in complete control.
As your readiness items complete, and your organizational assets turn green for migration, it is time to lock in the schedule. Your final emails are sent, and the logistics activities are set in motion. Dashworks checks the synchronization status of the source and target environments before triggering the migration activity through tools like Microsoft’s own PowerShell scripts, Dell Migration Manager and Binary Tree, and reports back on deployment success.
Of course, your project does not finish with the migration activity. There are post-migration clean-up tasks that need tracking before you can truly claim success. Mailbox validation, re-establishing the archives, user acceptance and deletion of the old mailbox are all activities that may need tracking. Post-migration surveys are sent to ensure that users have access to their expected resources and have not lost data in migration. Generating your project status report is done at the click of a button, and you can relax in the knowledge of an Office 365 migration well done.