IT ISSUE · PROJECTS AND CHANGE
Microsoft 365 migration
The mail moves easily. The permissions, rules and everything that signs in as a user do not.A migration sounds like moving data and mostly isn't. Messages and files usually copy across well, and still need checking afterwards. What causes the difficult fortnight afterwards is everything built around them that nobody listed, because none of it looks like data.
What doesn't simply come across
- Mailbox rules people set up years ago and forgot.
- Shared mailbox and calendar permissions.
- Delegate access arranged informally.
- Signatures, and the branding inside them.
- Links and shortcuts pointing at old locations.
- Anything that authenticates as a user: scanners, applications, alerts.
Decide what is moving before anything moves
We establish what exists today, what is actually in use, who has access to what and which of it should survive the move, then plan the sequence, the cutover and what happens to mail arriving during it.
A migration is the one moment when somebody has to look at all of it, which makes it the cheapest opportunity you will get to stop carrying things you don't use. Copying everything across unexamined is faster on the day and moves a decade of accumulated access into a clean tenant, where it will be just as invisible and a year older.