7 Risks You Need to Consider Before Trying a DIY Office 365 Installation

If you've conducted any research on Microsoft Office 365 as you evaluate your next communication and collaboration platform, you've no doubt encountered Microsoft's marketing messages about how Office 365 is so easy to build, deploy and migrate. Hearing this, lots of organizations can be tempted to save money and gain experience by trying a do-it-yourself “DIY” Office 365 deployment project.

But just as you wouldn't renovate a house on your own carefully planning and reading about the potential pitfalls, you need to educate yourself about the risks of a do-it-yourself intranet migration. Keep reading to learn the seven biggest mistakes that companies make when going it alone with Office 365.

1. Allowing the Migration (and the Tool) to Drive the Process

It's easy to get caught up in the banal minutiae when reading all the migration advice out there, trapped in a cycle of overanalyzing exactly which tools will be best for your business. But the tools that you use should be the last thing to think about. Your first priority should be determining the sequence of events for your migration and the overarching strategy that will put your new intranet solution into place.

2. Not Accounting for the Time Required to Move Your Content

Simply put, migration takes time. Some organizations have terabytes of files, emails and SharePoint content. And the more you have, the longer moving will take. For example, Exchange cannot support more than 400 gigabytes of legacy data per day, while SharePoint and OneDrive migration will give you a bandwidth of 10 gigabytes per hour, at best.

You need to think about the time that your migration will require, which data will be migrated first, and the temporary solutions that you'll enact while the migration is taking place.

3. Not Knowing the Limitations of the Platform

Like any cloud platform, Office 365 has its own set of limitations. Of course, there are ways to overcome them, but you can only do so once you’ve taken the time to learn about what they are.

For example, Exchange has limitations on the size of a single email attachment, and SharePoint has limitations on customization and branding. You need to know every one of these potential hurdles well before you migrate the content. Because if these issues will be problematic for your business, you might need to consider a different solution.

4. Not Planning for Support When You Go Live

Some businesses go in with the expectation that support for their installation of Office 365 will be nothing to worry about – it’s a Microsoft product and cloud-based, right? Unfortunately, this kind of mindset is only asking for trouble. You need to consider how you'll manage and escalate support and maintenance issues going forward, since you can't just head to the server room and fix things anymore.

5. Your IT Team Will Lose Some Power and Control

Consider issues like how to set up your help desk, what tools to use, how to monitor user problems, and how your IT team will deal with the loss of control. When you’re used to doing things yourself all the time, it's easy to overlook matters like these.

6. Not Communicating the Changes to Your User Community

When you allow the migration to drive your process, communication can suffer. Instead, you need to be proactive with a robust communication strategy that parallels your efforts with the actual migration. In your communication plan, you should be answering the following questions for your staff:

What does the change look like? Why is the change being made? What are the expected outcomes of these changes? What will the support structure look like? What are the new constraints?

7. Not Understanding Your Return on Investment

Most people move to the cloud primarily for financial reasons, because they expect a better ROI than with their on-premises system. This may be true, but how will you measure this, and what will be your next steps if Office 365 doesn't deliver quite as good a ROI as you anticipated? Again, you need to ensure you’re planning for more than just the tactical steps around the migration.

Final Thought

As you can tell, there is a lot you need to consider and review with the Office 365 platform before you embark on a risky DIY project. If after your research you do decide to make the move on your own, make sure that you acknowledge, understand and plan for every issue listed above.

And if you're still uncertain, it may be wise to consider engaging with a third-party consultant who will have the expertise you need, but may not be residing under your own roof. Check out this good article on how to select a good Office 365 consultant.

Please join the conversation and let me know your thoughts!