Chapter 4
IN THIS CHAPTER
Transitioning your email to Exchange Online in Office 365
Exploring the options for migrating files to SharePoint Online
Setting up your organization’s digital collaboration hub
The IT professional of yesterday is fast transitioning into today’s and tomorrow’s cloud professional. Cloud pros do not deal with cumbersome legacy technologies and applications that work only on-premises. They take advantage of cloud-ready technologies and keep in mind the question: What technology will my company use in five years?
If you’re an IT admin looking to implement Microsoft 365 Business, congratulations! You have taken a major step toward becoming a cloud pro. You have left the pack of dinosaurs and are now with the “It crowd" (pun intended) of cloud technologists who are in demand and have an exciting career ahead.
Microsoft 365 Business is nothing without Office 365. The chat-based workspace, email, calendar, voice and video meetings, real-time co-authoring, intranets, and even workplace social networking all happen in Office 365. In fact, the mass adoption of Office 365 drove the need to bundle other Microsoft cloud services into a single offering in Microsoft 365 Business to simplify not just the licensing but also the management of the services.
True to the theory of Diffusions of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers (Free Press), Office 365 adopting is at its peak (Figure 4-1) and is expected to double its growth each year, as shown in Figure 4-1.
I was one of those who adopted the technology back in 2010 when it was called the Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) suite. Since then, I have kept up with the innovations in the service and shared my knowledge through a book I co-authored, Office 365 For Dummies, and of course, this book. My adoption of cloud technologies has opened many doors for me in the IT industry, which is unusual because my bachelor’s degree is in business administration, not computer science. If you question the career advantage of being a cloud pro career-wise, I hope my story helps remove any doubt.
In this chapter, you get insights into the effort required to migrate email systems into Exchange Online in Office 365. The intent is to provide general guidance for migrating email rather than step-by-step instructions to do a migration, because each organization’s email environment is unique. You learn how to take advantage of the online storage capabilities of SharePoint Online and get hands-on instruction for enabling your end users to self-serve.
Being an innovator or an early adopter has advantages. The tribal knowledge of how the technology has evolved can be helpful when troubleshooting issues. And with your feedback, you get to contribute to the incremental improvements of the technology.
Inversely, being the first to try out a new technology has its share of disadvantages. For example, email migration in the very early stages of Office 365 was complicated and often required consultants and highly trained systems engineers to accomplish. SMBs were at a disadvantage especially if they had emails hosted on-premises and didn’t have thousands of dollars budgeted for a migration project. Migration best practices were sparse because systems engineers themselves were still trying to figure out the quirks of the system.
If your small business is still using an email system that doesn’t have a custom domain name, you’re missing out on the opportunity to reinforce your brand and build trust. Worse, your competition could register a domain name you should have and divert potential business away from you.
I tell my clients that the first step in migrating email to Exchange Online — if they don’t have an existing mail server — is to register their domain name. Several domain registrars, including Microsoft, offer discounted rates for domain name registration.
For small businesses running their own mail servers or that have their emails hosted by a third-party provider, the general process for migrating email for all users at the same time is four-fold:
Outlining a step-by-step process for email migration is challenging because each email environment is different. In fact, the detailed activities for each of the four migration steps outlined in the preceding section can drastically vary from one organization to another.
There is, however, good news. The Setup Guidance card in Microsoft 365 Admin Center, shown in Figure 4-2, is your gateway to a successful email migration.
Click the See All Guides link on the card, and the Setup Guidance page appears. From there, click the Office 365 mail Migration Advisor (see Figure 4-3) to get started on your mailbox migration journey.
The Mail Migration Advisor is a wizard that takes you step-by-step through the email migration process. It’s built to accommodate different scenarios, so you know you’re not being given a cookie-cutter approach to migration. For example, when you get to the What’s Your Mail System? section, most common email scenarios are already accounted for, as shown in Figure 4-4.
You don’t have to complete all the steps in one sitting. You can save your work and go back to it later. After you’ve added a mail system, however, the left pane will display the rest of the steps to complete the migration, so you can track your progress, as shown in Figure 4-5.
Your subscription to a Microsoft 365 Business license includes 1TB of cloud storage in OneDrive for Business per licensed user. In addition, your organization gets 1TB of storage in SharePoint Online plus 10GB per licensed user.
Let’s say for example you have 10 users, each with a Microsoft 365 Business license. Here’s what your free cloud storage would look like:
If you’re wondering how much data you can store in 1TB of storage, consider the infographic from http://itelementaryschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Terabyte.png
. In it, the author claims you’d have 60 piles of typed paper stacked as tall as the Eiffel Tower to consume 1TB of data.
With that much storage, you might wonder why SMBs are still using file shares and third-party SaaS applications such as Dropbox. For a majority of small businesses, the challenge is moving their existing data to SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business.
Traditionally, migrating data to SharePoint Online required complicated tools requiring senior engineers. If a business did not have a budget for such tools or expertise, an IT admin would have to spend an enormous amount of time manually moving files and dealing with sync issues.
The good news is that Office 365 is designed to break traditions. What was challenging a few years ago is now a simple, free, self-service tool. With a few clicks, an IT admin can now confidently migrate files to document libraries in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business.
The SharePoint Migration Tool is a handy application taking the guesswork out of moving files to Office 365 from either your hard drive, third-party SaaS storage provider, or on-premises SharePoint environment. You basically just need to download the tool and, with a few clicks, the tool will do its magic while you, depending on the size of data you are moving, grab a cup of coffee or turn on Netflix to watch your favorite show while you wait for the tool to finish its job.
Here’s how it works.
http://aka.ms/spmt
.Double-click the downloaded file to run the tool and then click the Sign In button, shown in Figure 4-6.
The Where Is Your Data? screen appears.
In the Browse for Folder window, choose the folder you want to migrate and then click OK.
The Select a Source and Destination screen reappears.
Click the Next button.
A new box appears in the same screen so you can paste the URL for SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Document.
On the next screen, review the entries for the Source and Destination, and then click the Migrate button to start the migration process.
The tool displays the migration status. If you need to change the Source or Destination entry, you must restart the process.
The tool captures logs from the migration job, which you can view after the migration. Seeing the logs can be helpful for troubleshooting.
If you must close or accidentally close the tool before the migration job is complete, you can resume the job from any computer, provided that the job has run for at least 5 minutes.
Another way to migrate files to SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business is through the OneDrive sync client. After the sync client is running, you can simply drag files from the source location to the appropriate library in either OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.
If Windows 10 has been deployed with the Microsoft 365 Business license, the OneDrive for Business sync client is automatically set up for the account using the device. As such, OneDrive for Business folders will be available in File Explorer.
If you’re migrating files to a SharePoint Online document library by using the OneDrive sync client, you first need to sync the SharePoint document library to your desktop. You do this by navigating to the SharePoint Online document library, and then clicking the Sync icon on the command bar, as shown in Figure 4-7. The sync client will prompt you through the rest of the steps, which are straightforward.
Microsoft Teams is the core collaboration tool in Microsoft 365 Business. With chat, voice, and video communication capabilities, Microsoft Teams answers the needs of team members working and collaborating today. The service has built-in productivity apps like the Office Apps and integrates with other services such as SharePoint, Planner, and Outlook.
As a digital collaboration hub, Microsoft Teams enables users to customize their workspace to fit the unique needs of the team. Third-party SaaS applications — even bots! — can be added to the service. People outside the organization can also be added to Microsoft Teams, extending collaboration outside the walls of the organization. Because Microsoft Teams is part of Office 365, security and compliance is standard in the service.
The out-of-the-box configuration for Microsoft Teams is usually sufficient for most small businesses. However, if your organization has specific policies, you can customize the settings from Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center, which you can access as follows:
https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/
.Like other admin centers in Microsoft 365 Business, the Dashboard page for Microsoft Teams Admin Center contains cards. Although Figure 4-8 displays only four cards, expect this page will have more cards in the future to streamline the work for IT admins.
In the left pane, note the sections where you can customize settings. Under Org-Wide Settings, for example, you can turn external access on or off. You can also enable Microsoft Teams users to communicate with users who are using the consumer Skype platform, as shown in Figure 4-9.
Microsoft recently implemented a Microsoft Call Quality Dashboard (as if we don’t have enough dashboards already) so you can view reports about call quality, voice quality, and more. To check out the new dashboard, click Call Quality Dashboard in the left pane. This dashboard is new, so expect more features and improvements to be added soon.