A Partner’s Guide to Microsoft Office 365 Migrations

There’s little doubt that the cloud is a huge opportunity for partners, and Office 365 migrations are right at the top of that list.

So how do you, the partner, make a seamless transition for the customer?

This one-stop gallery offers help to make that happen.

**Source material by Kasia Lorenc**

Follow executive editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: The Cloud Movement Is On

As if you needed any more evidence that businesses are moving to the cloud, this pie chart, featuring stats from a harmon.ie study, note that a significant change is well underway.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: The Partner Profit Outlook

If partners haven’t already started helping customers with Office 365 migrations, it’s not too late. There’s still a significant chunk of this market to grab.

The numbers above, also from the harmon.ie study, show the services partners are laying on top of Office 365 migrations; the percentage that see obstacles in the migration; and those who see vertical as a rising revenue opportunity.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: Making the Case

Office 365 offers a ton of benefits — reliability, security, disaster recovery, productivity and scalability, to name a few.

It can reduce costs and help your customers implement industry best practices, giving them an edge on their competition.

But there’s a catch …

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: Seamless Transition

… You need to offer them as seamless of a transition as possible. And there are several steps to take to do that.

First is determining how much of a role you, the partner, will play. You can take a DIY approach or you can outsource the migration. If you choose to outsource, you can still make money from long-term consulting and support services.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: Know Your Customer

Make sure you understand your customer’s business from top to bottom.

Knowing the types of workers they employ and the work that they do will help you determine the migration tools they need as well as the security and compliance issues they face.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: Reasons for Office 365 Adoption

The chart above can give you a conversation starting point. There’s a good chance that your customer is interested in access to the latest version of apps, email migration to save storage and the cost savings of Office 365, to name a few.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: Apps on the Move

Furthermore, customers – according to the harmon.ie survey – are eager to move all kinds of applications to the cloud, from email to online meetings to social interactions and collaboration.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: Capacity

The size of the business is important. You need to make sure that the host can handle it if your customer has a large amount of mailboxes and data to migrate.

And what should be a no-brainer: Be sure to schedule the migration for a weekend when fewer users need access to the system. If the business can’t afford to have email stop even temporarily, consider a third party-service to keep it up and running during the migration.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: Tools for Partners

Partners embarking on a migration project might want to check out the Microsoft tools above to help make the move to Exchange a smooth one.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: Need for Speed

It’s important that the migration is not only seamless, but speedy to maintain business continuity.

Sometimes a WAN or a basic Internet connection are a bit slow; and they don’t necessarily give the best performance once the migration is complete.

An Ethernet Virtual Private Line from cablecos such as Time Warner Cable can deliver extra bursts of bandwidth.

A Partner’s Guide to Office 365 Migrations: What’s Next?

The graphic above shows increasing opportunities for partners around Office 365 in the future.

A Partner’s Guide to Microsoft Office 365 Migrations

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