In order to successfully transition to the latest business software, an organization needs to plan ahead. Through communication, upgrade deployment, and post-deployment training and support, you can help your employees be productive from day one.
There are a few tools that you can use to guide your planning, deployment, training, and support stages of transitioning to Microsoft 365.
Plan
You can never be too prepared when you’re rolling out new software. When you’re getting ready to deploy a suite as robust and expansive as Microsoft 365, you’ll have to plan ahead to get the best experience possible and drive early adoption.
Delivering timely, informative updates about the change through the appropriate channels will be the key to drive awareness, inspire action, and empower your employees to be productive with their new tools.
By putting the focus on readiness and communication, you will be able to reach out to your employees in the early stages. Be sure to use direct language that carefully avoids any confusing technical jargon.
When explaining the upcoming deployment, make sure to use a tone that is friendly, inviting, and excited. This will help to build a feeling of excitement while educating your employees about new features and benefits of Microsoft 365.
Deploy
The technical decision makers within your organization will have their hands full when it comes to deploying updates, migrations, and new technologies.
While you may already have an in-house IT team, you may want to consider turning to a Texas Microsoft partner who can use their wealth of experience with earlier versions of Office to carefully plan out and execute the deployment of Microsoft 365.
They will configure automatic updates for everyone on-site who will be using Office, including both on-site and remote employees, as well as any partners and vendors around the world that you are working with.
You can also turn to tools like Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to help you to make this highly complex, often delicate, enterprise-wide project run as smoothly as possible.
In the past, customizing individual update schedules created unnecessary administrative overheads, but the new update channels function on Microsoft 365 ProPlus allows your team to specify every update needed. You can then tailor the schedule for every employee to suit their needs.
Support
To successfully deploy Microsoft 365 across a large organization, you’ll need training and ongoing support. There are a number of tools that you can make use of to help your employees adapt to the new technology.
Using these tools can increase productivity from day one of the deployment. Having an internal readiness program in place is a good way to encourage your employees to learn the platform individually.
You can offer a variety of training tool formats, including downloadable guides, how-to videos, and step-by-step instructions. Your employees can make use of these tools to learn at the office, through the cloud, or on the go on a mobile device. Make as many tools available as you can, so you can enhance employee adoption and encourage productivity.
Include Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams comes as part of Microsoft 365, and it’s designed to be a one-stop communication hub for business teams. It’s especially become an invaluable tool for remote teams during COVID-19.
Before you start using Microsoft Teams, it’s a good idea to make sure your organization is technically and legally ready for Teams. There are several traffic forms combined on the platform:
- Traffic between the Microsoft 365 environment and the Teams client
- Peer-to-peer communications
- Conferencing traffic
The amount of traffic you will need depends on your company’s environment, so you will need to make sure that you sufficiently planned for the bandwidth requirements.
This will largely depend on which Microsoft tools you currently use in your organization. If you still need more details on how Teams works alongside SharePoint, Microsoft offers helpful documentation to get things set up properly.
At the planning stage, you will need to verify:
- Your bandwidth and technical capacity
- Your Microsoft 365 licensing agreement compatibility with Teams
- Your Microsoft 365 domain
- Identity and authentication models
Making Microsoft 365 Deployment Easy
Deploying Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams and all the other tools that are included, can be easy if you prepare your organization properly and partner with the right IT experts. Contact Tolar Systems today to learn how we can help you fully implement and utilize this powerful business tool.
