“The One Thing”: Executing a Successful Migration to Office 365 - By Jeff Lizerbram, MCSA, Solutions Architect
When it comes to the topics of self-improvement and time-management, I am a bookworm. My latest favorite is by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan entitled “The One Thing: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results” (look for it on Amazon.com). In a nutshell, the authors guide the reader through small actions that can make a huge impact. Whether it relates to business, finance, personal life or other goals, it seems to be a method that all successful individuals use, but up until recently, it has never been really articulated on HOW they use it. Well, lately, I have been putting this mindset to the test, and during some recent Office 365 migrations that I have had the opportunity to lead, it seems The One Thing mantra has led to more seamless implementations than ever before. I wanted to take this opportunity to write about how I use The One Thing to successfully execute an Office 365 migration for large enterprises.
The authors of the book explain that the core to “The One Thing” is by asking yourself a question: “What is the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” Using this question, and relating it to the task at hand, I was able to put together an Office 365 migration plan that was efficient, effective and helped an organization get from point A to point B with minimal effort in reduced time. And as an added bonus, the plan became a template that could be used for many other projects down the line.
Migrating an organization to Office 365 can seem like a daunting task – especially if the organization involves thousands of users, thousands more of shared and resource mailboxes, and hundreds of thousands of documents that need to be transitioned to OneDrive for Business. Asking the question “What is the ONE thing I can do to migrate [your company name here] to Office 365 such by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary?”, it became evident the tasks that needed to be put in place, and in priority. And given a definitive time window to complete the project (let’s say 3 months), the question can be broken down even further to help prioritize the One thing that needs to be done at any given time:
“What is the One thing I can do this quarter?”
“What is the One thing I can do this month?”
“What is the One thing I can do this week?”
“What is the One thing I can do TODAY?
...that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary?”
Thinking through the project this way allows me to prioritize what is needed to Plan, Prepare and Migrate to Office 365. For example, the one thing I can do this Quarter is have my project plan signed-off, and on-time. This Month’s One Thing might be to complete fully accurate end-user and administrator documentation, so my customer has the information to execute and support their users after the migration is completed. This week’s One Thing might be to establish the end-point Office 365 connectors so that I can test and pilot Email and File migrations to Office 365. Today’s one thing is to gather all of the administrator accounts necessary to setup the environment – if you think about it, just having the login credentials necessary makes everything else easier, doesn’t it?
So with this mindset, I’m off to do another Office 365 migration. I hope this helps, not only for other Office 365 Solution architects out there, but perhaps for people in general as a way to organize life!
About the author:
Jeff Lizerbram has over 20 years of experience working in the information technology field. As a solutions architect for Managed Solution, with an emphasis on Microsoft Cloud products, Jeff contributes strong technical expertise designing and implementing scopes of work including migrating Email, SharePoint, local file storage and Skype for Business services, as well as other critical business systems, from on-premise or other hosted platforms to Microsoft’s Office 365. Jeff is actively planning and designing projects, writes technical as well as end user facing instructional guides, and trains staff and clients. When not working on projects or working with his Managed Solution team, Jeff loves spending time with his family and exploring the great San Diego outdoors.
Other blog posts by Jeff Lizerbram:
Registration Now Open for AWS re:Invent 2015 - Las Vegas October 6 - 9, 2015
Why Attend AWS re:Invent 2015?
Join the largest gathering of the global Amazon Web Services community at AWS re:Invent 2015. Whether you are an existing customer or new to the cloud, you will leave AWS re:Invent with the knowledge and skills to refine your cloud strategy, improve developer productivity, increase application performance and security, and reduce infrastructure costs.
Gain New Skills & Knowledge
Gain deeper knowledge of AWS services and learn best practices that you can’t find anywhere else. Choose from over 250 technical sessions covering architecture, operations, security, and more.
Bootcamps & Hackathons
Get hands-on experience with AWS in full-day technical bootcamps, self-paced labs, and hackathons. Plus, get official recognition for your skills and knowledge by getting AWS Certified.
Q&A with Experts
Get your technical questions answered by the engineering teams that built the AWS Cloud and attend sessions lead by AWS architects, engineers, product leads, and expert users.
On Wednesday, June 17th Managed Solution Business Development Managers, Sean McMahon and Tina Rountree attended the AITP June Chapter Meeting. The event featured a prestigious moderator and panel of industry experts from Gartner, Intuit, Qualcomm, Siege Secure & SoCal Privacy Consultants discussing Cloud vs. On-Premise Security.
Peter Coffee, VP of Strategic Research at Salesforce, once said, "The battle is over, and the cloud has won.” However, there are many others who disagree. Over 60% of surveys show companies have not moved to the cloud because of security and privacy concerns. Are these concerns still valid? Have cloud vendors addressed security concerns adequately? These questions were addressed and discussed in detail by the distinguished panel of security experts at last nights event.
AITP June Chapter Meeting Featured Speakers:
• Matt Stamper, VP of Managed Services redIT, Moderator
• Paul Boulanger, Vice President SoCal Privacy Consultants
• F. Christian Byrnes, Managing Vice President Gartner Research
• Joshua Davis, Senior Director of Information Security & Risk Management Qualcomm
• Richard McElroy, Chief Information Security Officer Siege Secure
• Erik Naugle, Director of Cloud Strategy Intuit
On Saturday, June 20th AITP San Diego partners with GeekGirl for TechCon 2015, a full day event for women and men from 8-88 to learn how to code, hear industry thought leaders and meet some new tech friends.
Do you recall sitting in a movie theater in 1993, watching Drs Grant and Sattler driving across the grasslands of Isla Nublar, when a white-suited John Hammond suddenly stands, mouth agape, a look of childlike joy on his face? The camera cuts away and there, real as life, was a dinosaur—a massive brachiosaurus picking leaves off a tree.
It was as though every dino-dream we had as kids was finally confirmed through the magic of film. Jurassic Park inspired many of us, so we wanted to take a look at some of the best tech predictions from the greatest B-monster movie ever made.
Touchscreen computers. Perhaps one of the “greatest” hacking scenes in film comes when Lex looks at Jurassic Park’s computer, locked by the traitor Dennis Nedry (anagram: Nerdy Sinned). “This is Unix,” she says. “I know this.” (LOL).
Lex flies through a clunky GUI to begin resetting the park’s systems: and she does it with a touchscreen. This was a decade before the first touchscreen phones that didn’t require a stylus, and two decades before touchscreen tablets revolutionized how our children will understand interaction. For bonus points, notice the IR-based “hood” around the screen—a grid-based precursor to the technology behind the original Surface table.
Awesome CGI monsters. Go back and watch Jurassic Park again and marvel at how damn good those dinosaurs look. Some of them are puppets, but many are full-screen CGI renders. Jurassic Park was one of the first films to use CGI effects, and the dinosaurs still look better than monsters created two decades later. It was a groundbreaking achievement for Industrial Light and Magic and literally created the bar for how computer effects are still measured today.
Smart Cars. Jurassic Park’s tour begins inside special Ford Explorers, equipped with their own TV screens, CD-ROMs (!), that drive themselves along a track using GPS. Two of those three science-fiction elements have now come to pass—it’s hard to cruise down the highway and not see a minivan or SUV without a kid glued to a DVD player installed into the back of the driver’s seat—and self-driving cars on a massive scale may only be a few years away. That bodes well for the adoption of the bubble cars and trained packs of raptors teased in the Jurassic World trailer.
Chaos (Complexity) Theory. Raise your hand if you actually understood what Ian Malcolm was talking about with chaos theory. If you didn’t, here’s the skinny: using computers, you can model a big complex system if you have enough data, and attempt to predict how a small, seemingly insignificant variable might affect the entire system.
Originally called chaos theory at the time when Michael Crichton wrote the novel, this concept eventually morphed into complexity theory: tiny, seemingly inconsequential changes could actually produce drastically different outcomes with different long-term iterative models. These effects could only be studied with computers, and what once required massive supercomputers to attempt to model can now be done with the same cloud computing systems and data gathering techniques that companies use for resource and customer planning.
It’s too bad that we can’t get someone as awesome as Ian Malcolm to run the data division though.
The Office 365 Transform and Reinvent Your Business Model webcast answers many of the questions that users and executives may have about today’s topics at the intersection of technology and business.
Managed Solution partners with clients to offer IT as a Service, where cost optimization and management consulting provide a guaranteed service delivery – with no risk. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Managed Solution is pleased to participate in this webcast and provide a brief overview of who we are and the services we provide.
Presenters:
Joshua Shea, Microsoft Partner Sales Executive
Tim Tetrick, Microsoft Partner Technology Strategist
Sean Ferrel, Managed Solution President & CEO
Work Anywhere With Documents Online
Save your Office documents online via the Microsoft account. Microsoft has the sister suite of web apps for Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint save the last location where you left off work before saving– to the letter, cell, or slide. Pick up where you left off working on a different device while away from your main computer. You can also continue your work on Mobile apps for Office.
Don't Cut and Paste Anymore
There’s this quicker way that uses lesser key presses. Using Cut-Paste (Ctrl-x Ctrl-v) to move text from one place on the page to another within a Word document is fine. But try this. Select any block of text. Press F2. You will notice that the status bar (at the bottom of your screen) says Move to where. Place the cursor at the location where you wish to move the block of text. Press Enter and the selection will be moved.
Searching for Data in Excel
When you search for data, you can use ? to represent any single character or * to represent a series of characters. Example if your data has all the states, you could type “*Dakota” and it will pull up both North and South Dakota data.
Auto Filter in Excel
Too much data to go through? Use AutoFilter to find values, show or hide values, in one or more columns of data. You can filter based on choices you make from a list, search to find the data that you want to see. When you filter data, entire rows are hidden if values in one or more columns don't meet the filtering criteria. Click the Data Tab- Filter to activate.
Save and Auto Recover in Word 2013
It will happen! A computer crash, power goes out or you just close without saving. To avoid losing all your work when this happens, make sure AutoRecover and AutoSave are turned on. Simply click on the File Tab- Options- Save and make sure the SAVE AUTORECOVER INFORMATION IS SELECTED and you can select the number of minutes from 0-120.
Source: http://www.nhsocal.com/ResourceCenter/MicrosoftTipsandTricks/tabid/2566/Default.aspx
Cisco Live is Cisco's premier education and training destination for IT professionals worldwide - June 7 - 11, 2015 San Diego, CA
Be amazed and transform your outlook, your career, and your potential with 5 days of education, training, and more!
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Get inspired about their future
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Hear industry innovators discuss how technology is changing how we work, live, play and learn
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Learn from the experts about how the Internet of Everything (IOE) is connecting people, process data and things
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Learn what jobs are being created in the future IOE economy and how to help improve the world with IoE skils
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Learn how to best prepare to be a future innovator
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Attend the exhibit hall that houses over 200 partners and vendors
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Hear from special guest speakers about the new IT careers
The Cisco Live 2015 San Diego broadcast is free to view and will be featured here June 8–11.
College students in the San Diego Area are invited to Cisco Live for a special day of learning and mentorship. Registration is FREE*.
About Cisco Live
Cisco Live is Cisco’s premier education and training destination for IT professionals worldwide. We offer unparalleled opportunities to increase your knowledge of Cisco products and solutions via in-person events, live webcasts, and on-demand learning opportunities.
Date
Cisco Live 2015
June 7 – 11
Location
San Diego Convention Center
111 W Harbor Drive
San Diego, CA 92101
What is Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is a collaborative visual development environment that enables you to build, test, and deploy predictive analytics solutions that operate on your data. The Machine Learning service and development environment is cloud-based, provides compute resource and memory flexibility, and eliminates setup and installation concerns because you work through your web browser.
Machine Learning Studio is where data science, predictive analytics, cloud resources, and your data meet.
The Machine Learning Studio interactive workspace
To develop a predictive analysis model, you typically use data from one or more sources, transform and analyze that data through various data manipulation and statistical functions, and generate a set of results. Developing a model like this is an iterative process. As you modify the various functions and their parameters, your results converge until you are satisfied that you have a trained, effective model.
Machine Learning Studio gives you an interactive, visual workspace to easily build, test, and iterate on a predictive analysis model. You drag-and-drop datasets and analysis modules onto an interactive canvas, connecting them together to form an experiment, which you run in Machine Learning Studio. To iterate on your model design, you edit the experiment, save a copy if desired, and run it again. When you're ready, you can publish your experiment as a web service so that your model can be accessed by others.
There is no programming required, just visually connecting datasets and modules to construct your predictive analysis model.
To learn how Azure and/or cloud computing can revolutionize your business, fill out the contact form to the right or call us at 800-550-3795.
Try Azure Machine Learning for free. No credit card or Azure subscription needed. Get started now
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/machine-learning-what-is-ml-studio/
