Meritage Leadership Team
Microsoft 365 Rollout

FAQs

What is the project?

The Meritage Leadership team has been successful and continues to grow. We are reinvesting back into the business to help operational efficiency and make collaboration more effortless across the team. Our plan is to implement Microsoft 365 as our collaboration platform.

Why are we changing over to Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is more than just email; it’s an entire business application suite with dozens of applications, integrated through a consolidated platform. For an affordable monthly cost, this platform overdelivers. Among other benefits, this platform will help Team Meritage with:

  • eMail

  • Integrated collaborative calendaring

  • Individual and Group File Storage architecture (like Dropbox)

  • Project management

  • Task management

  • Work Flow automation (similar to Asana)

  • Approval workflows

  • Collaboration

    • Synchronous and asynchronos communication

    • Video/audio communication

    • Team oriented chat (like Slack)

Here’s a video that explains the O365 apps as an overview. We will not necessarily leverage every app, but this is a good overview! It might be worth running this video at 1.5x speed. Kevin talks slowly!

How will the project happen?

PRIOR TO MIGRATION

  • Behind the scenes, we’ll sign up for the M365 accounts with Microsoft

  • The implementation team will ask you for your email and password, so the automated migration system can log in and set up the sync.

  • Your email/calendar/contacts will be backed up prior to the migration.

  • We will select a weekend to perform the migration to minimize impact.

  • We will send out a Migration Instruction Email. This email will outline:

    • Migration Date and give a window of “down time” probably over a Saturday Night.

    • Instructions on what to do after the migration completes. We will need your cooperation to make sure you come back online.

    • We will also provide a help desk phone number for the Monday Morning after go-live

MIGRATION

  • Over a weekend, the team will move the email services for meritageleadership.com from GoDaddy to Microsoft

POST MIGRATION

  • If you’re running Microsoft Outlook, the software should be able to recognize the server change and have no impact. This isn’t always 100%

  • If you’re running your own email client, you’ll need to cancel the account and re-add the account as a Microsoft 365 account. The email/calendar/contacts will all be copied over in the migration, so you just need to connect

  • If you have a problem, you’ll have a help desk telephone number to call.

What could go wrong?

Any time you’re migrating systems and data, things can go wrong. These are some of the things that are known risks that we’re trying to plan for, and you should be aware of:

WHAT WILL/WON’T MIGRATE TO MICROSOFT

  • WILL MIGRATE

    • Email

    • Contacts

    • Calendars

    • To-Dos

  • WON’T

    • Email box rules

    • Permissions to other users (delegates)

  • MAYBE

    • Email signature

    • Recurring calendar items sometimes lose the "recurring" part. Might need to reset the recurring frequency

    • Replying to pre-migration emails (sometimes the reply-to email gets garbled in the migration... simply correct the email address before you hit send)

COOPERATION FROM GODADDY

Godaddy’s home-grown email services include a highly modified version of Office 365 that has limitations. Because they technically tie in to Office 365 for some services, we need their cooperation to “release” the account so we can go direct to Microsoft. This is an operational risk that we’re planning for on Migration Day. Hopefully they’ll be supportive of the change.

How will we leverage Office 365?

Without understanding how the tools work, we won’t be able to leverage its strengths. Consider this video:

Training on its features will be provide the team the greatest uplift! We will be implementing some of the tools in a standardized way, but one of the most powerful features of O365 is the ability for the user to leverage the tools.

SELF TRAINING RESOURCES: We have selected some of our favorite Microsoft 365 training and how-to videos here. Note, it’s a growing list!