Planning
Once assessment phase is over, Its the time for Migration to plan on how the migration should be executed.
The key points to be answered here is
- What all services needs to be migrated?
- What all data needs to be migrated?
- How data needs to be migrated?
- Is it going to be a cut over migrating or a staged migration with co-existence?
Service migration is comparatively easy as its only the configurations to be migrated. For example, if the GoDaddy Office365 tenant has configured to use Teams, Teams as a service needs to be configured and made available to the end users for chat, calls as well as collaboration platform.
Data migration is more complex. Data needs to be migrated from Source to the Target Office365 tenant. Beyond that, Data should be made available on the same location from the end user perspective to ensure that user experience is good. For example, if the Finance team is using a private channel in teams and has a SharePoint storage used as document library, Users expect the same document library available in teams once they start using the new Office365 environment.
The next point is on how the data needs to be migrated. Multiple options are available to migrate the data. Third part tools offer much more flexibility and more coverage with an additional cost overhead. Custom Scripts and free tools are available from Microsoft if there is a budget constrain to spend on third party tools, however has lesser flexibility and coverage. If no data transfer is required or end users can take care of their own data backup/restore, the service migration is going to be a straight cutover – however user experience will not be that good and has a risk that some data can get missed.
The final point is on the migration approach. Cut over migration is much more straight approach where the service will be migrated along with the data on a prescheduled cutover window. During the cutover window, services will be unavailable and once done, Users can access their services as well as data from the new Office365 tenant. Another approach is to perform migration in multiple batches, keeping both environment active. Once all users are migrated to the new environment, GoDaddy environment can be deleted. This require co-existence, where a partial set of users will be on the target tenant and will be using services from the target tenant once users are migrated.
Migration strategy is purely depending on the total number of users to be migrated and the volume of data to be migrated. I suggest that if the environment has more than 500 users, Staged migration will be better. If the users are less than 100, Definitely go for a cutover migration.
Lets make a plan for a small environment with less than 50 users and see how we can do a cutover migration with minimal downtime in the next part.