Office 365 migration
Office 365 migration is something that right now we are doing as back-to-back projects. We book them in on a weekly basis and prefer not to run them concurrently if possible. Many small businesses are making the transition which can be technically difficult, but once it’s done, the support requirements are significantly reduced for email and your users have access to an up to date high-quality toolkit for their IT needs.
So as a quick introduction, let’s look at why so many businesses are moving to the Office 365 cloud solution from Microsoft:
- Microsoft are pushing their cloud solution heavily and forcing Microsoft Office users down the route of Microsoft cloud-based email
- Microsoft Office 2016 is all about the cloud solutions; email is stored both on local devices and backed up in the cloud.
- Having your email synchronised across multiple devices means its so much easier to keep track of email, tasks and calendars.
There are around a dozen different offerings from Microsoft so it will be necessary to spend some time finding the right solution for your needs. For example, do you need:
- The full version of the Microsoft Office suite?
- Microsoft Access?
- Archives of all emails your business sent and received for legal reasons?
Please contact us now for advice or you can spend hours looking at the Microsoft documentation.
How much does it cost for Office 365 migrations?
Based on the last 20 or so migrations, a good guide would be:
Prices start from £300 to set-up your domain and create user accounts set passwords. This includes:
- Setting up the first 5 mailboxes
- Dealing with your existing providers
- Installing Microsoft Office 2016 on your PC or Mac’s
- Setting up your iPhone, iPad or Android phone
- Dealing with any user support requests post-migration
Items that take a little longer and need more careful planning are:
- Transferring mail from Thunderbird, Microsoft live mail, or Apple mail applications instead of Outlook
- We will decommission your existing mail servers and remove exchange from your domain, or if you are running a small business server 2003 / 2008 / 2011 we will make changes to allow it to work without an exchange email
- If your internet is very slow we will make a copy of your mail and preload it to Microsoft’s servers
- We usually do the migration over a weekend (and prevent people from accessing their mail during the change to reduce the support overhead)
For bigger migrations (over 20 users) we will provide an on-site engineer post-migration. For smaller ones, we can provide the same service remotely to keep the costs down. We can also set up things like exchange migration and active directory integration as part of the transition.
In any case, we will offer a fixed price quotation before we start work!
The top issues which cause Office 365 migration support issues are:
- Unable to take control of the domain name (if we don’t have full control panel access and we can’t take control of the domain we will simply refuse to do the migration as its too risky)
- Users & user accounts which we are not aware of
- Systems that integrate into an email which we don’t know about in advance & other domains doing odd things with mail
- Email groups and aliases which are undocumented and business-critical (which is why we ask for this information in advance)
- Wrong information provided on who needs email, Office and how to get hold of them
- Remote users that are simply impossible to get hold of complaining their email is not working
When we agree to do an Office 365 migration, you should get a spreadsheet to complete. It is imperative that this is completed accurately, peoples names spelt correctly and all aliases listed. We will check on your existing server that this is correct, but you need to be aware if we don’t know about it, you could lose emails. Now is also a good time to manage all the leavers’ accounts in your organisation and remove any unused accounts & archive their mail. We can direct email to a leavers mailbox if you wish. While a vast majority of our migrations are in London, Surrey or Sussex we can easily do Office365 migrations remotely. We also undertake Office 365 migrations for other IT support companies.
office 365 support
After migration office 365 support is available from us, contact us to find out more.
If you would like our help with your Office 365 migration or are not sure this is the right solution for you please contact us on 020 8099 5540
