Krome Cast: TECH-IT-OUT - Office 365 migration planning and O365 migration challenges

In this episode of Krome Cast: Tech-it-out we will be discussing the technical considerations when Migrating to Office 365. In this easy to consume technology podcast, we discuss the importance of effective Office 365 migration planning, the Office 365 challenges faced when embarking on an On-Premise Exchange to Office 365 migration plan, and the key principles to ensure a successful Office 365 migration.

This podcast features Krome Technologies Commercial Director, Sam Mager along with Krome's CTO Rupert Mills, using Krome's real-world client experiences of migrating from Microsoft Exchange to O365 for both SME and large enterprise organisations.

► ABOUT KROME: Krome Technologies is a technically strong, people-centric technology consultancy, focused on delivering end-to-end infrastructure and security solutions that solve business challenges and protect critical data. We work collaboratively with clients, forming long-term business partnerships, applying knowledge, experience and the resources our clients need to solve problems, design solutions and co-create agile, efficient and scalable IT services.

► KROME WEBSITE: https://www.krome.co.uk/

► SOCIAL MEDIA
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@krometechnologies
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/krome-technologies-ltd
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/krometechnologies/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/KromeTech
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KromeTechnologies/

► CONTACT
• Telephone: 01932 232345
• Email: info@krome.co.uk

Transcript

Sam Mager  0:01  
Welcome today's edition of Krome Cast, Tech-it-out. 

I'm Sam Mager, and once again joined by Rupert Mills, my business partner and co-founder. 

Today we talk about the technical considerations of moving from on-premise Exchange to 365. 

Microsoft state, they now have over a million business customers for 365, with the US being the largest market, but the UK being the second-largest consumer of this service. 

Clearly, Microsoft's plan is to encourage us all into the cloud. 

Given that, do you think that 2019 is the last iteration we'll see an on-premise Exchange? 

And what are the pros and cons of that?

Rupert Mills  0:45  
Honestly, no, we were told that Exchange 2016 was going to be the last on-premise Exchange, then along came 2019. 

So I would suggest that we're likely to consider in continuing the same vein. Exchange itself, I think, has been around for obviously, since 1996, something like that. 

And from that perspective, it's been a product that was one of Microsoft's leading products for years,  they are without a doubt, pushing everybody to Office 365 makes total sense from that perspective. 

But there's always going to be those niche systems, which you can't do it with. 

So we've got customers who are in very remote jungles, on small islands, etc. And the connectivity there for running off a cloud-based service just isn't there. 

And I think probably what's happened is that the people within Microsoft to realise that when they've got a large corporate who's going to have most of their people in Office 365, they need a hybrid environment, because they need to be able to keep those few small people still in a remote location. 

So I doubt that it will be the last version.

Sam Mager  1:44  
On a previous podcast, we've talked about how Microsoft are encouraging us all into 365, cloud services, in general. 

And we just talked also about how it doesn't fit for everyone. It's not necessarily a one size fits all approach to the cloud or to be on-prem. 

In your experience and in your opinion, what are the key considerations that we need to factor in when looking at do we migrate to the cloud?

Rupert Mills  2:12  
So a lot of those migrations can be quite simple. It's often relatively straightforward to migrate. But the key thing for me is getting the tenant right in the first instance. 

So a tenant is kind of the cloud based equivalent of an Active Directory or something along those lines, where it's the underlying piece that pins together the entire infrastructure
for what you're building, there's a lot of people that will take the approach of, Okay, I need to get a cloud service up and running. 

So might be Teams is a common one, especially with what's happened recently with COVID-19, etc. 

But from that perspective, the key piece is getting the tenant setup, right, because if you go and say, I'm just doing this to get Teams running, and you create a tenant, that isn't correct for 
the rest of your organisation, it's actually remarkably difficult to unpick that later without just turning the whole thing off and starting again. 

So getting the tenant right is almost like setting the foundations, right if you're building a house or building your Active Directory properly in the first place, if you get it set up, right, then you can easily build on it and implement the other services later on, but if you get it set up wrong, then that means you could end up having to have a lot of cost in setting it right later, or essentially unpick and start again. 

So getting the tenant setup, right is really the key thing I'd say is most concern when you're starting an office 365 migration. 

Sam Mager  3:27  
It's interesting, one of the things I was going to ask, you know, is there the easiest way to migrate? 

You know, the silver bullet, the panacea way of doing it doesn't seem like there is other than the pre-planning, with all projects we undertake, it starts with that definition workshop,  understanding what we're doing and why we're doing it, and that seems to fit very much in line with our methodology and ways of working.

Rupert Mills  3:51  
Yeah, I would say that that's definitely the case, you need to look at what the client is trying to achieve and how big they are. 

In order to take the right approach for them, some people, they will massively overblow it and some people will under consider what's going on. For me, there's kind of two approaches. 

There's either a big bang approach, where you take everything in, you push it all in one go, or the staged migration approach, up to about 50 people, you can take a big bang approach and just say, right, we're going to tell everybody emails down for the weekend, we'll migrate you over and then you come back on Monday, you have a new system, we can set that up and get that moved over, you can handhold it through very quickly. 

If you are more than 50 users, then actually a staged migration approach. where you have both systems living in co-existence for a while you migrate a few users, you test it, etc, is probably a much more, sensitive way to go about the migration is much more user friendly for those end users.

Sam Mager  4:45  
No one likes change.

Rupert Mills  4:46  
Yeah, no one likes change, exactly. 

But for me, the key point is that actually, we've had clients' with 10 users who've said, right, I want to have migration workshops and having 10 users, we can do that in less than a day. 

Just let's move them all over and get them done, all of that time that you spent planning is probably more time than it's going to take to the whole migration. 

Whereas we've had customers with 500, 600 users, maybe 1000 users who said, Oh, this is easy, we'll just turn on Office 365. And if they don't get the tenant set right properly, in the first case, they don't get the co-existence right. And they try and do it in a big bang. 
Trying to migrate 500 users worth of email over a weekend is challenging. 

So there's, there's the two different approaches. And really, it's about choosing the right one for the business. And then working through with the client what else there is that intertwines with the existing mail system.

Sam Mager  5:31  
With the advent of multi device environments now being incredibly common. 

So smartphones, iPads, tablets, gosh everything, you know, everyone's walking around with a plethora of devices on us. How does this affect how we plan migrations? 
And what impact can that have?

Rupert Mills  5:51  
So you need to consider mail access from any device.  Obviously, as you say, people were historically, you sit down at your PC, use email, and that was how you migrated. 

Now you've got your mobile, you've got whatever other devices, you've got other systems, linked in, and you need to plan that. So for us, it can be a question of looking at pushing out configs to devices, what kind of mobile device management do you have in place? 

There's other things like the Outlook client on your desktop. So the later versions of Exchange require a minimum level of Outlook in order to operate. 

So for example, we've seen clients where they've got very old versions of Office still within their environment. They've said, Oh, yeah, we're going to migrate to 365, pushed up to 365. 

And then, hang on on a minute, none of my outlook users will connect anymore? Well, no, because you've got a very old version of Office. 

And so taking all of those things, and pointing them out upfront can save the pain of trying to solve them on the day later on. But it's one of those that actually, you need to take a look at all the possible connections into your Exchange server environment, and how those connections are going to migrate. 

So it's important to do your homework. 

Sam Mager  6:54  
So it's back to the pre-planning.

Rupert Mills  6:55  
Back to the pre-planning. 

Sam Mager  6:56  
Absolutely, so as a business, we've undertaken some small ones, but also some very large migrations, including up to 150,000 mailboxes plus. When planning enterprise-scale migrations, what lessons have we learned, I guess, what's, what's the nastiest or important 'gotcha' that people need to consider when they're looking at large enterprise migrations?

Rupert Mills  7:25  
Large enterprise migrations, I would suggest that you need to be looking at all the things outside of your user base. So the user base tend to be the obvious area to look at, okay, we've 
got X number of users to migrate with X number of mail data or X amount of mail data. And you can work out fairly quickly a ratio of how many you can move a day how long that migration is going to take, and how it's all going to work and fit together. 

But it's actually all the other historic applications that in it, especially in the larger enterprise, will have been built over time, are going to have hooks into the mail system, they may not support, what mail protocols, they may be looking for particular, it's not uncommon for people over time to hard code things into Exchange, into servers to point to certain Exchange servers or whatever that may be. 

So that's a really common one. I would say, looking at your archive, don't forget your archive, people often say right, we're going to move all the data into Office 365. And then we're going to turn on the Microsoft compliance features and we've got archiving. 

Well, that's great. But if you've got an existing archive, how do you get all the data out of that, and into your Office 365. 

Or if you're not going to, and you're going to let that run down over time, you need to budget for keeping that existing archive, and potentially an existing Exchange Server in place to keep that running through until it ages out over 3, 7, 10 whatever your compliance regime of years is, but you need to make sure that you've taken into account keeping that running because often people don't. 

Outside of that, I would say don't migrate the VIPs first, [laughter] it's not uncommon for people to say I want to put the VIPs in, show them the new functionality, show them all the new stuff they've got. 

And actually, they're the people who are going to be most time-constrained with regard to troubleshooting or solving any problems at the time. 

So our recommendation is don't migrate the VIPs first, no matter how tempting it may be, that's a that's always a challenging one. 

But yeah, other than that, it's the, it's the systems in the periphery, the system's around it that you need to make sure you really take care of. 

And then obviously we've talked about before backup thereafter. So once you put all the data there, how are you looking after it? 

And what are you doing to back it up? So those would be the gotchas from my perspective.

Sam Mager  9:25  
Brilliant. Thank you.

That's us for today. Hopefully, that's been useful. 

If you'd like us to cover any more detail, or you'd like to ask us questions. 

By all means, put them in the comment section below. 

And please remember to Like, Subscribe, share, and give us feedback. 

It's always useful helps us shape the content of the various people that I'll have on the podcast with me. 

And thank you for joining us. This has been Krome Cast, Tech-it-out.