Here is a bullet point point version of the good and bad on the current status of Office 365 integration after speaking to a Yammer sales guy this morning. There is also an interesting article here.
- The current integration with Office 365 is a myth. While there is some basic visibility into Yammer, they are still essentially 2 different networks. So for now the free Yammer account will be fine for most people.
- In 6 weeks this will change and the Yammer feed will replace the SharePoint feed. Let’s see if that happens on time.
- This will only happen if you have an Enterprise Office 365 (E1-E4) account already and will cost $3 per user per month and no being a Microsoft Cloud partner doesn’t entitle you to free Yammer Enterprise accounts! WTF?
- This part amazed me the most. To sign up to Yammer requires a written contract that they send you and you need to sign up for 1 year. For a technology company that is pretty lame. Obviously 1.2 billion doesn’t buy customer service like it used to.
I am in the middle of doing my second email migration to Office 365. Originally I migrated our 9 accounts from Google Apps and this time I am upgrading from Office 365 P3 plan to the E3 plan. See plans here - http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans-FX102918419.aspx
With both migrations I am using MigrationWiz - https://www.migrationwiz.com
Before doing anything you should carefully read the instructions provided my Migrationwiz. In our case with an Office 365 to Office 365 migration the instructions are here - https://migrationwiz.zendesk.com/entries/20358091-How-do-I-perform-an-Office-365-to-Office-365-migration-keeping-the-same-domain-name-
Please Note: That the only reason we need to do this is because we are still on the old version (2010) of O365. In June they would have upgraded our system to 2013 versions and we wouldn't need to transfer our mail manually when going form a P3 to E3 plan.
This tool makes the migration a breeze. You simply:
- create a connector between your old mail system and the new one (You will need to be an admin on both systems)
- Specify the mailboxes to copy across and start copying
Benefits
- Very easy to use
- The support is great and very responsive
- It does multiple passes of the mail so that if during transfer more mail comes in, it will be picked up on the next pass
Things to watch
- Don’t use your main email address as the connector admin account. If using O365, use the onmicrosoft accounts they provide. These email addresses are unique to each account so when you transfer the MX records across you can still keep transferring in the background.
- Large accounts can be slow to transfer. In the screen shot above you can see that we have 2 15 gig accounts that will probably take a week to transfer. If set up properly though you can start using your new account straight away as it copies newer mail first.
Next I’ll be looking at transferring content from our internal SharePoint to Office 365.
If you need any help with your Office 365 migration, contact us at info@webcoda.com.au and we will be glad to help.