The humorist Sam Levenson once said, “You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.”
While that’s good advice for most situations, when it comes to IT pros, the truth might be more like this: “You must learn from the mistakes of others — otherwise, you won’t have a job long enough to make them all yourself.”
That’s because the projects you undertake can have profound repercussions for the business. Consider migrations. They are so complex and have so many dependencies that even small missteps can disrupt critical workflows or access to resources. Make mistakes during your Office 365 mailbox migration and users may find themselves unable to communicate or even schedule meetings. Stumble during a broader Office 365 migration and you might bring the entire business to a standstill. Everyone will feel the pain, and you’ll feel the heat.
If you’re reading this blog post, you’re probably facing an Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration in the coming weeks or months. If, like many such migrations, it’s being driven by a merger or acquisition, you probably got short notice that it was coming, and you might also have been handed a tight deadline. Nevertheless, stakes are too high to rush headlong into the project.
That’s where the experience of others comes in most handy — and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone with more migration experience than Quest. To help you get your Office 365 tenant migration planning started on the right foot, we’ve put together an Office 365 migration guide that describes the top pitfalls our customers have encountered in their tenant migration and consolidation projects, so you can avoid making the same mistakes.
For example, one of the most common missteps is not clearly establishing the scope of the migration. It’s easy enough to simply generate a list of all the accounts in your source tenant — but what you actually need is a complete and comprehensive inventory of all the accounts that you actually want to migrate. Migrating migrate accounts you won’t need will make it harder to meet your migration deadline, add unnecessary risk, and make your target environment harder to manage and secure.
I hinted at another pitfall earlier when I mentioned the risks inherent in a mailbox migration: not planning for coexistence. Even though your migration timeline might seem short to you, it will feel like an eternity to your business users if they can’t work and collaborate normally throughout the project — and your phone might spontaneously combust from all the irate calls. Indeed, a common theme in the whitepaper is that user satisfaction is often the primary measure of the success of a migration project, and you’ll learn about a number of pitfalls that jeopardize the user experience in one way or another.
If you’re on Office 365 and now you need to migrate between tenants, take Sam Levenson’s advice to heart, and invest a few minutes reading our white paper, “Common Pitfalls of Office 365 Tenant-to-Tenant Migration.”