Onboarding | Project Phases | Best Practices | Glossary of Key Terms

What you need to know

There are many important considerations you must follow to ensure the migration and transition are successful. Failure to follow best practices may result in project delays, disruption to users, and/or remediation that requires additional fees.

Required Best Practices

The following best practices must be followed.

Glossary of Key Terms – To ensure you’re on the same page as your Project Manager, it’s important you understand terminology that will be used throughout your project.

Setup

• Understand critical concepts
  • Project phases – A sequence of events must be completed before the transition to the new platform.
  • Migration methodology – It is critical you understand Transend’s migration methodologies and considerations. If you have concerns with Transend’s default methodologies, you must bring it to your Project Manager’s attention during the Setup phase.
    • Mailbox migration methodologies
    • File migration methodologies
  • Cutover details – Understand how the Cutover works, and default Cutover schedule options.
• Target platform readiness – Ensure the target platform is set up, the primary domain is added, users accounts are provisioned and licensed, and any required out-of-scope mailboxes or non-user objects are provisioned.
  • Set up Target Tenant
  • Provision Accounts
• Ensure language settings are consistent – If a user’s target account is set to a different language than the source account, a separate folder will be created in the target account with data migrate into that folder. To avoid this, customer must ensure both the source and target accounts are set to the same language.
• Do not change credentials – Once Onboarding credentials have been validated by Transend and the Setup phase is complete, credentials cannot be changed.
• Pay attention to storage – Ensure all target mailboxes and/or drives have enough storage for the source data.
  • When migrating from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, data expansion is likely due to Google’s single instance storage
• User communication – It is critical users know what to expect before and after the cutover. The following user communication best practices help ensure users are prepared for the transition.

Production

• Let the migration complete before managing mailboxes or data – Once the Stage-1 migration has started, do not manage mailboxes (i.e. change status or delete) or reorganize messages or folders in the source or target environment until the project is complete. Changing a mailbox status may result in missing data, and reorganization of a mailbox in-between migration stages could result in duplicate data or folders.

Post-Cutover

• Use the TARGET platform post-cutover – After the Cutover has been performed, all external and intracompany email communication should take place in the target environment, and not in the source.
• Understand Post-Migration Support – Managed Help Desk engineers are available to help for a defined period of time.
• Validate results online – Users should validate migrated data in the web browser rather than a locally installed client (i.e. desktop Outlook client). The web browser will display immediate results, while local clients can take time to sync.
• Understand what applications and devices require configuration – Depending on your setup, users may need to configure applications and devices to sync to the new mailbox.
  • Update Outlook profiles – If users have an Outlook client installed, follow the instructions to update Outlook profiles upon transition.
    • Remove or delete an email account from Outlook
    • Add an email account to Outlook
  • Update mobile devices – Users should update mobile devices upon transition.
• Re-shares files – If a file migration is in scope, users will need to re-share files or folders that were shared with internal or external users in the source platform. File and folder sharing permissions were not migrated over to the target platform.

Scope of Work Changes

If you need to change what’s included in your project’s Scope of Work, please send an email to [email protected] to request that your project requirements are updated.

Most Scope of Work changes require additional fees, although management will make that determination after understanding the additional project requirements.

Scope changes include, but are not limited to:

• Add additional accounts (beyond the number defined in your Agreement)
• Add file migration (if not already included)
• Include Add-on Services
• Upgrade your Project Type