Worldwide, the number of organizations – large and small – moving to Office 365 is exploding. However, making the change from Exchange to Office 365 can be more time-consuming and difficult than many anticipate. With this, it is important that people understand their options and what to expect when making the upgrade.
Advantages of Office 365
There are a number of advantages that come with making the move from Exchange to Office 365. With the cloud-based system, companies are able to retire old hardware and lower the ongoing capital costs associated with maintaining a physical server. Office 365 offers users more functionality and staff will never have to worry about making upgrades as these are done automatically. In addition, new features are being added all of the time and these become available immediately after they go live on Office 365.
How to Move from Exchange to Office 365
Business owners can choose to allow company staff to make the upgrade from Exchange to Office 365 or hire experts to do it for them. However, people who think that allowing current IT staff to handle the move may want to consider how much experience current personnel have with this technology. Transitioning from Exchange to Office 365 is often rather complicated and it can be particularly time-consuming if the people in charge do not have significant experience with this technology. When making the move, it is generally best to set up a hybrid system and gradually switch individual systems from Exchange to Office 365. The problem with doing things this way is that valuable information can easily be lost with a single mistake.
Why Hiring Office 365 Migration Experts Makes Good Business Sense
Companies often choose to hire experts to handle moving everything over from Exchange to Office 365 for a number of reasons. It can be rather costly to train staff members to make this transition effectively, and it is generally not worth it for a project that will only need to be performed once. If a company chooses to train current staff how to move from Exchange to Office 365, they will be doing this for the first time. However, specialist companies have large amounts of experience in these sorts of upgrades in addition to the right employees and resources to ensure that everything goes smoothly. In addition, Microsoft Silver or Gold Partners with the latest Office 365 certifications can offer guaranteed fixed pricing on the project. With this, it is generally best to hire outside experts when businesses decide to upgrade to the latest Microsoft office messaging system.
Darryl McAllister is a Consultant at NetCare365 – http://www.netcare365.com – a company which specializes in taking all the stress out of migrating your email and your data across to Office365.
And if you’re already on Office365, he provides free monthly Ask the Expert webinars and free advice on SharePoint apps to help you get more business value out of your Office365 subscription.
To learn more about Darryl, follow him on Twitter – http://twitter.com/darrylmca
comments (0)