Enterprise Playbook to Migrate to Microsoft Teams from Slack

Enterprises are often at the risk of losing visibility into all the intricacies when planning to migrate to Microsoft Teams from Slack at a large scale. This mainly has got to do with the sheer volume of users, channels, group messages, and direct messages along with the intricate collaboration structure between users.

If you are representing an enterprise with a large-scale migration need, it is highly important to have a framework for all the stages of the project to ensure your IT team does not go wrong in any area. We recommend referring to the framework we have shared here and adapt it as per your organization’s specific needs.

1. Preparation Phase

Prior preparation sets your enterprise organization at an advantage to make the most out of the partnership with a migration solutions provider. With proper preparation, your IT team will be equipped with the insights into scoping the Slack to Teams migration project in ways that align with the business end-goals (use cases), such as cost savings, cloud consolidation (into Microsoft 365), etc.
To ensure proper preparedness:
Involve the decision-makers from the early on:

• Communicate the move to the employees to ensure preparedness from their end
• Have clarity on whether your IT team will have to work with a pre-allocated or flexible migration budget
• Define the roles of the key people who will be extensively involved in the migration project
• Check the scope of legal approvals to eliminate friction in moving the project to the execution phase

2. Migration Partner Discovery Phase

Next, research third-party solutions providers to enable your organization to migrate to Microsoft Teams from Slack without facing the complexity of performing the migration in-house. A migration vendor with industry-leading solutions, like us, will help your IT team avoid the heavy lifting that goes into planning and executing the migration.
To choose the right Slack to Teams migration solution, consider making the following assessments:

• The capability of the tool to accommodate enterprise-level large-scale migrations
• The functionalities available to ensure the replication of chats and their properties, such as attachments, threads, user mentions, and more
• The compliance of the tool to adhere to enterprise-grade security regulations
• The performance capability of the tool to meet high-volume chat transfer needs without downtime and conflicts.

3. Demo and POC Phase

Learning about the functionalities and other capabilities of the migration vendor’s tool on paper is only one part of the picture. Another important part is to test the tool in a controlled environment to gain full clarity on its actual workings. Your IT team can either schedule a demo or a POC (proof of concept) to test the tool.
Consider the following parameters when planning to schedule a demo session:

• Preparing a pilot batch of a couple of user accounts
• Creating a sharing permissions structure as a sample
• Testing other features to migrate, such as emojis, pinned messages, etc

4. Pre-Migration Analysis and Scope of Work Preparation Phase

The next crucial phase is to perform an in-depth pre-migration analysis of the Slack environment, understand the regular usage pattern of the users, analyze the collaboration between users and their groups, finalize the Slack workspaces and channels to migrate, and plan the scope of work accordingly.

And after preparing a detailed scope of work (SOW), forward it to the finance and legals teams for approval. The more realistic the SOW, the higher the chances of getting quick approvals.

5. Implementation and Validation Phase

After finalizing all the parameters and the scope of work with approvals, move the project towards the initiation phase. Depending on the scope of work, your enterprise organization may plan to perform the Slack to Microsoft Teams migration in a single go or in several user batches.

If you plan to migrate all Slack direct messages, group messages, and user accounts in one single go, make sure to perform delta migration and the cut over only after the entire one-time migration gets completed.

On the other hand, if your organization plans to perform the migration in batches, make sure to perform delta migration of each batch after their respective one-time migration gets completed. Also, validate each batch as and when their one-time and delta migration gets completed.

6. Change Management and Adoption Phase

Lastly, having a proper change management strategy in place is a must for enterprises to lower the risk of user impact. And it goes without saying that a proper user training plan is a crucial component for enterprises to streamline the change management process.

Apart from in-house efforts, your organization can use external resources, such as Microsoft Teams adoption guides, to facilitate users in adopting the new Teams environment. In addition, your IT team, along with our migration team, can collaborate with the Microsoft 365 team and create user training collaterals that are highly specific to your enterprise organization’s employees and overall operations.

You can get more done with our migration team apart from strategizing and performing the actual migration. As a strategic Microsoft 365 partner, we at CloudFuze, can make the entire transition from Slack to Team seamless and secure for your large-scale organization. Discuss further with our team.