Quick Tip: Office 365 Migration Success

Many companies, regardless of size, are migrating to Office 365 for a variety of reasons - to support a mobile workforce, address security concerns, provide collaboration solutions and lower support costs with an always up to date application model.  Here are a few things to keep in mind as you begin your migration to the Microsoft Office 365 application.

Regardless of size, every company will have technical configurations that will need to take place prior to use; even the smallest companies could have numerous configurations. One specific configuration to pay close attention to – DNS. When you get started, you will have to enter a very specific DNS value – this is a security protocol to prove to Microsoft you own the name. Once this step is complete, you will need to manually update or add 10 additional DNS entries of varying types into your current DNS servers. It is important to remember, your new entries must not conflict with existing entries. If a conflict arises you must correct the situation.

Some companies experience issues because DNS errors don’t show up for a day or two after set up and you have gone live. In fact, this is also the window of time you could experience additional errors outside of DNS. The best piece of advice: be prepared for troubleshooting once your migration begins to Office 365 and have all hands on deck so you have the required skill sets available to avoid a prolonged outage.