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Office 365 is a cloud offering that provides various products and services for enterprises on a subscription basis. It gives you access to multiple applications like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Office Online, and many others. Along with email servers, it also provides email applications like Outlook that are valuable to today’s organizations. So, if you’re planning to deploy Office 365 for your organization, then here is some useful information for you.

There are various subscription plans for Office 365, and most businesses choose a plan that meets their business requirements. Well, according to Microsoft, the best method to deploy Office 365 in any organization is FastTrack for Office 365. However, there are many enterprises that deploy Office 365 with the help of their internal resources. But they need proper planning and set up to deploy Office 365 in their organizations. In this article, we will discuss how you can self-deploy Office 365 and migrate to Office 365.

Deploying Office 365 Enterprise

If you are willing to deploy Office 365 Enterprise by yourself, then you need to perform detailed research to understand how to make design decisions that can ensure the best cloud service configuration and user adoption. Below are some steps that you should consider for deploying Office 365 Enterprise. Here, we are discussing Office 365 along with your on-premises infrastructure.

  1. Set up your Network
    First of all, you need to set up a proper network in your organization, which includes adding the internet domains and optimizing the network performance for on-premises users.
  2. Set up the Identities
    Identity set up involves determining the identity model either for only cloud or hybrid environment. Also, setting up directory synchronization between on-premises Active Directory Domain Services and Office 365 subscription is necessary for hybrid identity.
  3. Apply Security capabilities
    Security should be a priority when it comes to deploying Office 365. It includes configuration of improved security, threat, and information protection for your tenant.
  4. Deploy client software
    By deploying client software, we mean deploying Office 365 ProPlus that is always updated. With every Office 365 client license, you receive a license of Office 365 ProPlus.
  5. Set up Mobile Device Management
    As we are talking about Office 365 Enterprise, setting up mobile device management is crucial because mobile app capabilities help you secure and manage your user’s mobile devices.
  6. Organize services and applications
    Configuring services and other applications of Office 365 includes collecting information on data migration and finding links to articles that help you get started on key Office 365 services like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams.
  7. Provide Training to Employees
    It is essential to train your employees for the Office 365 environment before deploying it in your organization. You can take help from short videos, documents, or tutorials to train your employees to get the most out of Office 365.

Following these points, you would be able to deploy Office 365 Enterprise in your organization efficiently. But, this information is helpful when you are moving to Office 365 for the first time. So, what would you do in case of migrating to Office 365?

Migration in Office 365

Whether you are performing Office 365 tenant to tenant migration or migrating from any other email server, performing migration is one of the most complicated tasks in Office 365. Also, the process depends on the type of migration that you want to perform. We have listed below a few examples of Office 365 migration.

  • Migrating PST to Office 365 with PowerShell Commands
    Microsoft provides a unique method to import PST files to Office 365 directly – Network Upload. This method involves using the Azure AzCopy tool and SAS URL to upload the PST file to Azure cloud and then importing it to the mailboxes. Know more about it here.
  • Office 365 tenant to tenant migration
    Tenant to tenant migration involves migrating Office 365 mailboxes from one tenant to another. Though the migration process is not that easy, it requires pre-migration analysis, domain preparation, migration scheduling, and much more. You can have a detailed look at this process here.
  • Migrating Exchange mailboxes to Office 365
    Most enterprises, especially small organizations, prefer to move their Exchange mailboxes to Office 365, and there are multiple methods to do it, such as Cutover migration or Hybrid Migration. If you also want to migrate exchange mailboxes to Office 365, then check out this article.
  • IMAP mailbox migration to Office 365
    If you want to migrate IMAP mailboxes like Gmail, AOL, Thunderbird, etc. to Office 365, then the manual process is very complicated and hectic. It involves verifying the Domain, creating users and adding them to Office 365, creating migration endpoints, and much more. And for quick and easy migration, we recommend you Kernel IMAP to Office 365 tool.

Performing any of these migrations manually is not easy at all. It consumes a lot of time and requires technical expertise to perform the steps. That’s why most organizations prefer to use Kernel Office 365 Migration, which allows quick migration between tenants and other email servers.

Conclusion

Deploying Office 365 in your organization is going to be an exciting task for you if you are doing it all by yourself. However, migrating to or from Office 365 can be difficult if you are not aware of the basic requirements as well as the migration process. So, in this article, we discussed how you could deploy Office 365 and migrate data to it.