5 Mistakes to Avoid While Deploying Office 365
Office 365 deployment can be a challenging task without proper expertise. Before you opt for an Office 365 deployment, there are certain things you must remember for a smooth and successful migration to Office 365. During implementation and adoption, you should clearly know your goals and requirements and plan accordingly.
However, there are some common mistakes that organizations commit while deploying Office 365, which you can avoid if you know them clearly.
- Not paying attention to the employee training
To be fully prepared for the implementation, organizations invest a lot of resources in Office 365 deployment, only to know that the end-users are not comfortable with the new platform. People are your biggest asset than any cutting-edge technology out there. If they are not trained to use the new platform, the rigorous Office 365 deployment would not be completely efficient as it would lack user involvement. This would in turn make you question the decision to go ahead with Office 365 deployment as it wouldn’t offer its full value.
Remedy: Make sure that employees are trained on the new platform. They should not be scared to use it after the launch. Instead of expecting them to embrace the drastic change, give them a taste of environment even before the migration takes place.
- Leaving migrations only to the technical team
When dealing with migrations, organizations tend to have a myopic vision with a mindset that only technical team should be associated with it. However, that is not true. Since migration will change the IT landscape of your company and everyone deals with some IT, every employee in the organization is a stakeholder. If there is friction between two teams about Office 365 migration, there would be a hindrance to the successful Office 365 deployment. Office 365 migration is too important to be just left to the technical team.
Remedy: All the stakeholders need to be on same page as to why switch is important for the organization. From the first day of adoption, let the key people of the organization involved in the process from the start, so that the knowledge transfer would be smooth and easy.
- Ambiguity around cloud adoption
The biggest resistance to Office 365 deployment that organizations have is the “migration is difficult” mindset. Moving data and collaborative efforts to cloud is no doubt a challenging task, but it can be done without any hassles under the eye of an expert.
Organizations often have compliance and industry standards to adhere to. It is very practical to have some mental resistance to any new system. Similarly, cloud adoption can be unsettling to many traditional and conventional business minds. But resisting change is a mistake that many decision makers are guilty of.
Remedy: Microsoft offers complete solutions to a wide-ranging compliance issues, which often limits companies to adopt for a cloud-based system. A financial institution can focus on risk management, oversight, cyber security, and threat intelligence.
- Lack of comprehensive pre-migration audits
Even if you’re working with a partner, there would be some work that can be only done from your end. Many a times, organizations conduct sub-standard audits as they are too much focused on the next step. Every nuance of your environment needs to be thoroughly inspected. Poor content management will lead to unnecessary pitfalls after migration.
Remedy: Before anything else, you should make sure that you’re conducting a comprehensive pre-migration audit studying the structure of your environment. After your environment has cleared feasibility checks, let your service provider know everything that would help them ease out the deployment process.
- Rushing through the migration
While it is productive to meet crunch deadlines, migrations can be complex to execute in a rushed timeframe. If your migrations are complicated, it is safe to assume that estimated time of completion will only swell further. You would not want to encounter any problems like data loss because of rushed deadlines, which led to poorly execution migration.
Remedy: Patience is the key for a successful Office 365 deployment. Clients can be very demanding with unrealistic timeframes, but starting slow is okay, to have a hassle-free migration without any data loss or downtimes. If you want any consulting help on Office 365 deployment, benefit from our rich experience in migrations. Feel free to talk to Apps4Rent’s experts anytime. Contact us now!
