Our Office 365 Adventure
No how-to here. Just our adventure into Office 365.
So the company I work for hired a couple of new VP's. Obviously this means they want to make their mark and show our owners that they made a good hiring choice. One of them is a complete waste of space so we won't cover that one. He's pretty much guaranteed to be here as long as he wants. The other one wants to to a trial of Office 365 as part of how he is trying to impress the owners.
His goals:
Sharepoint
Document control with revision tracking
Forms with workflows
Decrease process times using the above.
I know very little about Office 365 and he has said he would take the lead in showing it's value. He's going to do his own work and not try to use me to do it for him! Great!
We started out with 2 accounts, 1 for me as admin, 1 for him. This lasted a few days and he wanted to add more. In a few days add a few more. The we were up to a total of 9 for this "pilot". We got Azure AD working so now I have to delete the accounts and recreate them to use our domain. Not a huge deal. Then we got email migration working for one of my test users so we start migrating users. Unfortunately one big issue came up. No public folders. For us this is a big deal. Now he wants to add 6 more users. I convince him not to migrate their email because of the lack of public folders. He doesn't really care so they don't get migrated. Great! 6 fewer people complaining to me!
I found a solution from Microsoft on how to get the public folders working. I ran through the steps. Nothing. I tried migrating my test user back to my on premises Exchange server. Not happening. Crap! I've tried running through some solutions I found on migrating back and so far nothing works. Last resort, I'm waiting until our consultant can help us out with this.
I also got wondering about how this affects my on-premises CAL count for Exchange. It looks like an Office 365 E1 subscription IS your standard level CAL for on-premises. Found this article explaining it. All we are using is standard anyway so this frees up some CAL's for me.
I'll add updates as we progress with this...
1/30/2020 Update
So here we are almost 4 years later. We've expanded to about 65 O365 E3 users and we will be accelerating that adoption to everyone over the next year. Our MPSA with Microsoft will expire in early 2021 and I want to drop all Office related items off that renewal since we will be fully migrated to O365. At that point we will also migrate off our on-site Exchange server to the O365 Exchange servers.
In bad news, for us anyway, Teams is replacing Skype for Business. It just doesn't seem as easy to use although one VP with nothing better to do has spent a ton of time getting used to it and likes it now. While we won't block Teams from being used, we have other, and in my opinion, better options. We have also migrated from AT&T for our phones to a VOIP system using Fuze. Fuze has a collaboration package that I think is much better than Teams. Our issue is that we have customers that are only allowed to use certain software. That means we need to maintain flexibility on what our people can use, and I don't have a problem with that. Teams, Skype for Business, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Fuze Collaboration, all need to be supported.
I guess overall the migration toward Office 365 hasn't been a disaster so I guess that's a good thing. I wish I had the time to learn more about the admin side of it. I still have my job so I guess everyone else is good with it too!!
1/30/2020 Update
So here we are almost 4 years later. We've expanded to about 65 O365 E3 users and we will be accelerating that adoption to everyone over the next year. Our MPSA with Microsoft will expire in early 2021 and I want to drop all Office related items off that renewal since we will be fully migrated to O365. At that point we will also migrate off our on-site Exchange server to the O365 Exchange servers.
In bad news, for us anyway, Teams is replacing Skype for Business. It just doesn't seem as easy to use although one VP with nothing better to do has spent a ton of time getting used to it and likes it now. While we won't block Teams from being used, we have other, and in my opinion, better options. We have also migrated from AT&T for our phones to a VOIP system using Fuze. Fuze has a collaboration package that I think is much better than Teams. Our issue is that we have customers that are only allowed to use certain software. That means we need to maintain flexibility on what our people can use, and I don't have a problem with that. Teams, Skype for Business, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Fuze Collaboration, all need to be supported.
I guess overall the migration toward Office 365 hasn't been a disaster so I guess that's a good thing. I wish I had the time to learn more about the admin side of it. I still have my job so I guess everyone else is good with it too!!
