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Things to Consider when Moving to Office 365

Mark Mulcahy from Waterford Technologies covers some of the issues you should consider before making the move to Microsoft Office 365. Considered

Mark Mulcahy from Waterford Technologies covers some of the issues you should consider before making the move to Microsoft Office 365.

Considered as the fastest growing cloud service on the market, Microsoft Office 365 is the single platform vendor that is used by a majority of businesses across the globe. Although this application has developed a certain status in terms of its capabilities, there a number of factors that should be weighed up first if you are thinking of making the move.

1. Migrating is not a simple process

If you have an on-premise Active Directory environment and you want to perform a migration, it won’t be an easy process. Exchange Server 2010 SP2 includes a wizard that reduces the number of steps from roughly 50 down to six, but the migration process is still tedious and requires a lot of advanced planning.

In-depth planning of a migration is also critical as it’s important to ensure that the platform suits the internal requirements for your organization. You should also think ahead to any potential future migrations as Office 365 hosts all your data which may create restrictions in the future.

2. You may have to start over with spam filtering

One of the biggest things that surprised me was that spam filtering suddenly became an issue. Office 365 uses Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange. Although Forefront is a decent spam filter, I had to take the time to configure it.

3. Outbound email addresses might change

When you subscribe to Office 365, all user accounts have a default email address that ends in onmicrosoft.com. While it is possible to use your own domain, simply accepting mail for your domain name isn’t enough. Outbound messages will continue to use the .onmicrosoft.com domain unless you make some configuration changes, which are far from intuitive.

4. You can say goodbye to third-party utilities

Many organizations use third-party utilities to manage Exchange Server. If you are using any such utilities and they’re designed to be installed directly on an Exchange Server, you won’t be able to use them with Office 365 (unless you keep an Exchange Server on premise). Microsoft does not allow you to install software onto the Office 365 servers.

5. You might have DNS issues

When you add a domain to your Office 365 account, you will receive a list of DNS entries that you must be make for the domain to function correctly. Although most of these DNS entries are relatively straightforward, Microsoft Lync requires some SRV records to be created.

This shouldn’t be a problem for those who have Microsoft DNS servers, but it can be problematic for non-Microsoft DNS servers. For example, my ISP manages my DNS entries. The ISP had no idea how to create the SRV records because it uses a Linux DNS server. That isn’t to say that the DNS entries won’t work with a Linux DNS server — but if someone else manages your DNS, you might have trouble getting the necessary DNS records created.

6. You may have to use different management tools

Because I didn’t keep any on-premise servers, managing Exchange through the Exchange Management Console was no longer an option. Office 365 uses the Exchange Control Panel as the primary Exchange Server management tool. Likewise, user accounts are created through a proprietary interface rather than through the Active Directory Users And Computers console.

7. You might have to reset file server permissions

Just remember that if you are outsourcing everything except for your file servers, you probably won’t be able to use Active Directory accounts for managing file access.

8. Prepare to be bombarded with phone calls and email messages

One aspect of the transition that really surprised me was that I was bombarded with phone calls and email messages from Microsoft. While I appreciate having the opportunity to ask questions about the transition, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Conversely, Office 365 as been criticized in the past for lacking a dedicated support team. So make sure you have the support you need when transferring as otherwise you may experience some difficulty in getting the answers you need to technical issues or concerns.

9. You might not be able to immediately connect users’ mobile devices

One of the issues I ran into during my transition was that even though I was able to bring my mailbox online quickly, the logistics of the transition kept me from connecting my Windows Phone to my mailbox for several days.

The reason for this is that prior to the transition I had an on-premise domain and an on-premise Exchange Server. Rather than working through a co-existence scenario and migrating everything, I decided that it would be easier to start fresh. This meant that if I had immediately connected my phone to my new Exchange mailbox, my contacts, calendar entries, and old messages would have disappeared from my phone (which would have been a big deal).

So I had to create a PST file on my PC and move all my mail, contacts, and calendar entries from Outlook to my PST. Once that was done, I disjoined my PC from the on-premise domain and then connected Outlook to my new Office 365 mailbox. Then I copied all my PST data to the new mailbox. At that point, I was able to connect my phone to my mailbox without having to worry about losing access to my contacts and other data.

Obviously, this won’t be a concern for organizations that work through the “real” migration process. But smaller organizations that choose to abandon their on-premise domain will have to consider this.

10. Expect a loss of control

Finally, moving to Office 365 means giving up some level of control over your data. For example, you won’t have any control over the patch management process, software upgrades, and other similar administrative tasks you may be used to performing on-premise.

In addition, moving to Office 365 will require you to consider whether you can afford to have a single storage location. Single-vendor dependency is something of a gamble as it massively increases the potential risks to the security of your organisation as all your email information is located in one place.

Also take note that if for any reason you cancel your subscription to Office 365, all your existing data is deleted after just 90 days. This means that you are tied to a single vendor, even during migration. Additionally, if Office 365 has an outage, you will have no access to any current or historical emails.

Considering a Move to Microsoft Office 365?

Whether your business is considering a move to Office 365 or you have already migrated, the team at Waterford Technologies can help your make the most of it. Our products integrate seamlessly with and are the perfect partner for Microsoft Office 365.

Click here to learn more about MailMeter from Waterford Technologies or why not read how we helped Saongroup, one of the world’s leading online recruitment business, make the most of Office 365.

Alternatively, you can always get in touch with the team here at Waterford Technologies with any questions you may have about migrating to Microsoft Office 365.