Office 365 Migration Requirements: A Handbook For IT Admins

Migrating your business data to a new environment can be overwhelming and complicated. However, it can be made more manageable through a well-planned series of essential steps for the migration.

This guide lists out all the critical Office 365 migration prerequisites to help your internal IT team to overcome any challenges and be fully prepared for a seamless data transfer.

Walk Through of the Migration Tool’s Capabilities

When choosing a migration tool, it is recommended to know if it is capable of handling your unique business requirements.

A walk-through discussion meeting has to be arranged between your internal IT team, key decision-makers, and the migration vendor’s technical lead and migration team. The meeting agenda can include a walkthrough of the migration tool and discussions around the project scope and making tool customization if required for meeting specific migration needs.

Office 365 migration requirements also include executing a pilot run or POC to experience and learn how the migration tool works and handles specific business scenarios, and identify potential risks.

Evaluating Email Migration Parameters

As part of Office 365 migration prerequisites, your company must decide and finalize specific email migration parameters. For example, when migrating business email data from an existing email service provider like Gmail for Business to Microsoft Outlook, assess and filter out any inactive email accounts and map only the necessary email data. Also, choose which email attributes, like calendars, contacts, to-do lists, attachments, etc., must be migrated to Outlook.

Selecting a reliable email migration tool is the key to meeting the criteria mentioned above.

You can check out CloudFuze’s business-focused email migration service that offers custom email data mapping and migration.

Determining Messages Migration

Like email migration, your internal IT team must choose which messages to migrate from your existing communication tool, like Slack to Microsoft Teams. This is one of the integral Office 365 migration requirements that organizations must consider.

By leveraging a competent data migration tool, you can migrate audio, images, links, and attachments in your messages from the source to the destination cloud platform.

Configuring and Pre-Provisioning New User Accounts

One of the foremost steps in meeting Office 365 migration requirements is to create new Microsoft accounts and configure the initial settings.

Pre-provision and check each user account to see if they are active in Microsoft 365 before transferring the data.

Creating SharePoint Online Sites

The checklist of Office 365 migration prerequisites also includes creating SharePoint Online sites before the actual data transfer. This procedure helps to organize and structure data in libraries better and ensure that users can access the required files for better productivity.

Understanding User Roles

User roles for data access vary across different cloud platforms. Understanding these differences helps the IT team in avoiding confusion and errors while transferring files to Microsoft 365.

For example, in Microsoft, there are no user roles like ‘Previewer’, ‘Uploader’, or ‘Co-owner’ but roles like view, edit, and owner.

Changes in user roles from Box to SharePoint Online:

Changes in user roles from Google Shared Drive to SharePoint Online

Having a well-planned Office 365 migration prerequisites checklist helps your company’s internal IT team be ready to tackle any unforeseen circumstances and make a holistic and disruption-free data migration.

You can also refer to an exhaustive checklist for Microsoft 365 migration that includes both pre-migration and post-migration evaluations.

Reach out to our data migration experts to know more.