Key Points

1. only billable options for personal or business
2. covers all modules of Microsoft Office in different packages
3. MS Access DB is available only on desktop
4. generally document format with compatible at level 2007
5. runs on any platform: windows, linux, mac os
6. allows Visual Basic for Applications and ?? as scripting languages
7. Excel can use external data sources via ODBC

References

Key Concepts

business subscriptions for Office 365

MS Office Mgration Planning Checklist

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/deployment-planning-checklist

Office 365 migration plan

https://blog.juriba.com/planning-an-enterprise-office-365-migration

With scalability, lower support and infrastructure cost and rapidly growing functionality, many organizations have started to investigate and budget for their Office 365 migration project. But large-scale deployments with tens of thousands of mailboxes and hundreds of dependencies, hybrid environments, and other complex scenarios make the migration process more difficult to manage. Consequently, moving to Office 365 requires diligent planning and analysis before the project kicks off.

In the past decade, we have successfully readied more than 5 million assets for migration using our IT Transformation software, Dashworks. Many of these assets have been mailboxes, so we thought we would share a summary of the essential components we believe are required for planning a successful enterprise Office 365 migration project. Here are 11 easy-to-follow steps:

1. Plan For The Plan
2. Plan & Build Your Project Scope
3. Plan Your Project Team & Structure
4. Plan Your Target Infrastructure & Platforms
5. Plan How You Will Design, Build, Test & Manage Your Gold Image
6. Plan For Dependencies, Storage & Network Issues
7. Plan Your T(minus) Timeline
8. Plan Your Scheduling Methodology
9. Plan Your End-User Engagement
10. Plan Which Software Tools Will Best Support Your Migration Efforts
11. Plan Your Deployment Logistics

Office mgiration planning tips

https://blog.juriba.com/office-365-migration-budget

Microsoft Office 365 is designed to make workers more productive by getting them out of their silos and making them more accessible and connected to the rest of the organization. It holds enormous potential for return on investment. However, it requires not only a clean migration but also executive buy-in, careful planning, and lots of education and training to ensure that the new features are adopted. Therefore, your migration project plan should include enough time and budget for these crucial steps.

Business Plan & Executive Buy-in

The first hurdle, of course, is understanding the return on investment, and identifying exactly what you are budgeting as in scope activities. First you create a comprehensive business case in which you lay the foundation for careful planning and ensure executive buy-in. In this step, you:

• Calculate how much Exchange (or your legacy email platform) was costing you so far (including all the server and administrative costs)
• Decide if you want to outsource your email solution completely to an outside vendor or retain internal control
• Estimate which (if any) mailboxes must stay onsite and which will move into the cloud
• How many admins and other resources you will need going forward
• Which parts of the email solution will be in scope for this project (e.g., just the mailboxes, archives, public folders, storage)

Planning Phase

Once the business plan is complete, your management is onboard and your preliminary budget approved, you can move into the next phase. In the planning phase, you will run an assessment on your current environment to get a better understanding of the actual circumstances that you are dealing with.

It is advisable to budget for the use of a data warehousing solution like Dashworks, as it connects seamlessly to your existing repositories for your critical project data such as users, mail delegates, public folders, mobile devices, shared drives and more. Now you can decide who is running the project, how many resources you will need, what processes will be in place, how the mailbox permissions will be managed, and how the migration will be rolled out (e.g., by departments, buildings, or user by user).

Build Phase

In the next phase, the build phase, you are creating a plan for the actual migration, e.g., you budget for the

• Tools that you might use
• Infrastructure you will need (e.g., Active Directory)
• Man hours needed to run actual migration
• Data center space
• Storage hardware
• Migration Planning (data warehousing readiness, communications, etc.)
• Operational Handover
• Migration Deployment
• Training & Education
• Change Management & Incentives

Plan Twice, Migrate Once

There is an old saying for seamstresses: "Measure twice, cut once." The same goes for IT migrations, especially for Office 365. By spending enough time planning, you eliminate costly disasters later. In our experience, organizations often underestimate the time it takes to build a sound solution and then get stuck. Be sure to budget for enough time and resources for planning and building before migrating and always err on the side of caution. In reality, this means to build in a buffer of about 25% additional budget into your expected estimates.

Microsoft FastTrack Services for Office 365 Adoption

https://blog.juriba.com/microsoft-fasttrack

If you are in the process of purchasing — or you have just purchased — an Office 365 subscription for your enterprise organization, you are probably already fretting about how you will handle this massive migration to the new platform!

As you have probably heard from your Microsoft representative or reselling partner of choice, Microsoft offers free migration assistance called FastTrack for all eligible subscriptions over 50 seats. FastTrack offers best practice guidance, tools and, for larger clients, even remote migration assistance to get you onto the Office 365 subscription in the fastest possible timeframe.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Juriba has worked side-by-side with the FastTrack team to migrate more than 100,000 mailboxes. But Office 365 customers are often confused about how to tackle the next planning steps once the ink on the contract has dried.

We often get these questions: "How can we take full advantage of the Microsoft FastTrack program?" and "How do we make sure we get the most out of Microsoft FastTrack?".  

Today, we want to walk you through these steps and hopefully clear up any confusion. 

What Is Microsoft FastTrack?

Before we start walking through the steps, let's talk about the FastTrack program in general.

Microsoft FastTrack allows Exchange Online, Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 ProPlus, OneDrive for Business, Power BI, Project Online, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business Online, and Yammer Enterprise customers with a valid subscription plan over a certain number of seats to reach out to Microsoft's self-driven, but remotely supported services.

These services are divided into onboarding and user adoption categories:

• Onboarding Services are comprised of core onboarding (e.g., tasks required for tenant configuration and integration with Azure Active Directory) as the minimum required level of onboarding to be eligible for other services and service onboarding and migration which consists of various tasks that enable scenarios in your tenant as well as data migration. 
• User Adoption Services are designed to make your end users aware of eligible services and happens alongside of the onboarding process. 

There are two levels of FastTrack services:

• Customers with smaller installations (50+ seats) can log on to FastTrack.microsoft.com to gain access to best practices, tools, and resources as well as some personalized remote assistance. This service is available in many different languages. 
• Customers who purchase at least 20,000 licenses for an Office 365 tenant have access to the FastTrack Center — a team of hundreds of engineers trained and experienced in remote onboarding and migration assistance.

Typically, a FastTrack Center engagement takes approximately four to six weeks until all eligible applications are provisioned and the adoption plan is under way.

Let's look at the process in a little more detail. For the sake of clarity, we will focus on FastTrack Center (20,000+ seats).

Accelerate Your Office 365 Migration With Juriba Dashworks & Microsoft FastTrack

Once you have purchased your enterprise Office 365 subscription plan, the FastTrack team will reach out to you within the first 30 days of purchasing an eligible Office 365, EMS, or Azure license. There is no time limit as to when you are eligible for the service, so if you need to kick off your onboarding immediately, the team is available, or If you need to delay your onboarding, you can do that as well . 

Onboarding Kickoff

The FastTrack onboarding process gets kicked off with an initial meeting to review your needs. While most of the actual development and implementation of your success plan, the overall program and project management, and any enhancements and integrations to your Office 365 tenant beyond the FastTrack configurable options are your responsibility, the FastTrack team can be a considerable help in getting the most out of your Office 365 plan. 

Bearing in mind that you will be responsible for any detailed analysis, migration scheduling and end user communications, it is advisable to have your Dashworks environment set up and configured to support your first step. Dashworks is often utilized as a  central data warehouse and command and control center for data gathering and analysis to position you for further environment assessment and project delivery.

Assess Your Environment

During a pre-onboarding check, the Microsoft FastTrack engineers will help you identify and notify you of any required readiness tasks that you or a Microsoft partner of your choice will have to complete before onboarding. This check will identify any considerations for adopting a hybrid Active Directory, re-pointing DNS entries and other technical tasks.

During this phase, you will also want to assess the complexity of your mailbox environment. For example, many organizations will have a spider web of mailbox delegation that reaches far and wide, and significantly reduces the ability to migrate quickly. Archive mailboxes, local PST files, Outlook client versions, applications with hooks into the mail infrastructure and other plug-ins will all need to be identified and assessed for migration. If planning other migrations such as file storage and instant messaging, or even PSTN platform change, then much further analysis and data gathering will also be required.

Based on some of the above, the FastTrack team will help you decide whether or not your project is outside of the scope of the FastTrack engagement, and if you need further assistance through a qualified Microsoft partner of your choice. 

Remediate Any Issues

The FastTrack team will supply you with a checklist containing any found technical issues that need remediating (e.g., additional configuration for identity management, upgrading your infrastructure to supported software, or updating the network) as well as suggestions on how to fix these issues.

Based on that checklist, you can use Dashworks to gain actionable insights into not only the migration process, but also into capacity management of your resources, the progress of the re-configuration process, and all other relevant action items and deliverables. Using the checklist as guidance, Dashworks will enable your team to assess, ready and schedule the more complex mailboxes, users, files, and calendars.

In addition to that, you can use Dashworks to handle any end-user email communication in an efficient, automated way and use the self-service portal for data validation such as delegation rights and identifying what can be removed. Furthermore, you can keep your internal stakeholders, as well as your assigned contact at the FastTrack team, informed by running instant reports and visualizing almost anything on the migration in dashboards.

Migration

Even though a significant percentage of mailboxes will have delegates, exceed file size limits or other criteria that makes a direct migration for the Microsoft team too complex to handle under this free value-add, having the Microsoft team handle the execution of the straightforward ones is very helpful.

For this, you will simply be asked for a list of email addresses that can be migrated by the FastTrack team. By running a quick analysis of your mailbox environments in Dashworks, you have all the information you need at your fingertips. After the initial mailboxes have been migrated by the Microsoft engineers, you can use Dashworks to de-tangle the spiderweb of left-over mail boxes and remediate/schedule them accordingly.

Many complex customers will then use Dashworks to trigger migration activities, using many of the same tools utilized by the FastTrack team, but under local control.

Enable Core Capabilities

Once migrated, you will work with your FastTrack team to ensure that your cloud solution is ready to use, licenses are assigned appropriately, and other eligible services are planned for migration.

Conclusion

The FastTrack program, especially the FastTrack Center track, is a wonderful value-add to ensure all enterprise Office 365 get the most out of their subscription plans. It is offered at no-cost and, as far as we know, there is never any upselling to add expensive consulting hours.

However, while the program provides best practices, tools and some remote execution, you will need to have a central command and control center such as Dashworks to help you manage the more complex aspects of your migration to get your organization onto full adoption in the fastest, lowest cost timeframe.

To Learn

Potential Value Opportunities

can embed office apps on server apps ( eg Trade compliance with ooffice doc apis )

try creating data sources for calc on normal sql and nosql dbs using jdbc or odbc drivers

Virtualization Options for Users

Storage

OneDrive

or DropBox, Google Drive

Desktops

Windows

Linux with .Net Core - Windows 10

MAC OSX

Mobile Desktops

IOS

Android

Security Options for Users

Active Directory

Communication & Collaboration Options for Users

Active Directory

MS Exchange

SharePoint

Skype

Linkedin messaging

Zoom

Slack

Rocketchat

Potential Challenges

MS Excel bugs

data validations DO not work on list data IF list definition specifies cells in the list

the list definition =.   

codes!$A2:$A100 

Office 365 Security Policy problems in Web browsers

A company may set security policies that prevent Office 365 docs from opening in browsers like Chrome

In once large company, you can open / edit a Word doc in a browser but not an Excel doc 

this is from security policies incorrectly set

problem >>

Using MS File Explorer, the option to open an Excel file in a browser will fail, the file will download instead

Get a Web url for an Office doc to open in a browser using Sharepoint or OneDrive

search for the file in SharePoint, OneDrive or Teams

open from there, the file should open in a browser

from there, copy the browser url and it can be opened again from that app ( SharePoint, OneDrive or Teams files )

Office Mgiration Challenges to Avoid

https://blog.juriba.com/office-365-migrations-hiccups-to-avoid

q> how to handle bad MS updates in cloud environment ?

Enterprise Office 365 migration can be a scary business! Not only are you dealing with thousands of mailboxes that your end users depend on every single day, but there are so many dependencies, data storage & exporting issues as well as solution design questions to deal with. And while there is plenty advice out there, some of it is inconsistent, out-dated or misleading. So, where do you start?

To give you a starting point, we have compiled a list of the nine biggest Office 365 migration hiccups so you can avoid them:

1) Office 365 Changes. A Lot. Office 365 changes a lot. And I mean a LOT. Last year, Microsoft pushed out more than 450 updates for its cloud business productivity suite last year alone! This can result in a migration nightmare because you need to ensure that you are current in order to be able to implement the best available features in the right way at the time.

2) Scheduling Spider Web. In Outlook, users are often using the delegate function to let other users (e.g., team members, assistants) manage their calendar and mail. This can create spider webs of delegates that are a nightmare to migrate as all the connected mailboxes have to be migrated at the same time. You will have to go into each mailbox, find the delegates (and the delegates of the delegates) and group them together before migration. Also, you have to make sure that the trail does not lead back to the original mailbox you started with. 

3) Migrating Public Folders. Migrating legacy public folders to Office 365 can be a nightmare. Since hundreds of users can have access to one public folder, but one user will also have access to several public folders, the migration can easily spiral out of control. Microsoft recommends managing the online public folder mailbox growth using an auto-split feature that splits the public folder mailbox when it exceeds size quotas and then use batch migration to alleviate the problem. 

4) Inconsistent Migration Advice. No matter, who you ask, it seems nowadays everyone who has ever had his hand in Office 365 has some piece of (unsolicited) advice to offer when it comes to its migration. There is almost as many opinions and approaches out there as people giving it. Some of it is helpful. But beware - there are also misleading, outdated or inconsistent suggestions out there, that can stall your migration, so make sure, who is giving the advice. Always rely on a reputable source and fact-check.

5) One Size Does Not Fit All. Unless you are starting completely from scratch, you will most likely deal with having to mix on-premise Exchange as well as Office 365. In enterprises, there are many legitimate reasons to implement your mailboxes in a hybrid environment. There will always be certain mailboxes you need tighter control over. Or you need to deal with latency issues connecting to cloud-based mailboxes. It is important to realize that one does not fit all, and the design decisions have to be made with the organization’s goal in mind.

6) Getting derailed during legacy archive export. Archived mail and the file size issues that come with it can become a huge problem for moving to the cloud. There are legacy archive solutions, but they can be very slow and a migration of the legacy data could  take several months! Another problem is that most on-premises legacy archive solutions do not work well with Office 365 and you will most likely have to come up with a workaround. You could also use a native export tool to rehydrate the stubbed messages back into the mailbox directly or look to a third-party tool, like Archive 360,, to handle the export, rehydration, and upload process.

7) Retention Limits & Litigation Hold. Regular Outlook message retrieval is one of the biggest pain points for admins, but with a default retention limit of 14 days for Office 365, this will quickly become unbearable. Even if you extend this limit, you will max out at 30 days. For all mailboxes that need to save their messages longer, Microsoft recommends placing these on litigation hold. 

8) Go Big Bang Or Go Home? Another key consideration you have to make is to figure out your migration approach. You can either do a full-blown big bang migration or a partial migration where some items move to Office 365 while others stay, or slowly using tools that sync your data between the source environment and the target to maintain access across the disparate infrastructures. Understanding the impact of each choice is a key hurdle as it will result in either more risk or more cleanup!

9) Choice Of Migration Tools. Finally, it is important to think about which tools you will be using for your migration. The tools that Microsoft provides are quite basic, but certainly adequate for small businesses. Medium-size businesses to enterprises are looking at more sophisticated tools such as Dell Migration Manager, Binary Tree, SkyKick, who will execute the migration for you. Setting up these tools is complex and requires a project management team that truly understanding the entire end-to-end process. The hurdle here is to decide whether or not to use these tools at all, and if so, which and how put the correct team in to implement them successfully.

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