Office 365 - Teachers making the transition

[maxrebo]

Hi,

Were in the early stages of planning for an upgrade from an on-Premises exchange to Office 365 and I'm wondering how the Teachers and students have taken the transition?, Is there anything they found difficult to understand?

 

Any feedback on the transition in general would be grateful.

Thinking of moving over in the Summer.

 

Thanks

[afc123]

We went live Wednesday all I can say is brace yourself. SMT wanted a different password which is fine assemblies on how to login live demos a MONTHS notice to change the initial password.

 

Did anyone do it? Of course they didn't it's been chaos. Also some people lost emails whilst the DNS records changed but we told them this in advance to be careful and ask for important emails to be delayed until they got the ok. Also the interface will be too confusing for certain people , I have had someone storm in saying they have lost all their folders and saying how shocking it is etc all the emails have gone despite showing everyone where folders are.

 

Good luck

 

P.S. Password changes by default are 60 days so you may want to extend that if your doing it over the holidays :-)

[maxrebo]

Thanks for the reply,

I can see there will be some uproar, we need to upgrade our ageing server that its hosted on now so I thought we might as well make the move instead of staying with what we have.

It looks like it offers a lot of great benefits but I don't doubt for a minute I will get a bit of stick.

Were currently upgrading our Office package from 10 to 13 and were already getting hassle about users "not liking it" and "cant use it"

 

Please keep the advice coming!

 

Thanks

[witch]

I have done two schools now and I have been surprised at the low level of user upset (of course, they may not have told me...)

The younger teachers are very happy as it is much more like what they are used to with the likes of their home email and even the older teachers are OK. Telling them how to turn off the preview so that more emails fit on the page helped a lot!

They mostly managed to log on OK and change their passwords although I did have one who didn't put the correct time zone in so she was getting emails at 2am!

As I said on a different thread - try not to have to migrate everyone - only the ones with important emails to keep,. In this school the head just wanted SLT, Year heads, admin, SEN, pastoral and finance to migrate - the rest were told to go through their emails and save anything they wanted.

[FN-GM]

We went live Wednesday all I can say is brace yourself. SMT wanted a different password which is fine assemblies on how to login live demos a MONTHS notice to change the initial password.

 

Did anyone do it? Of course they didn't it's been chaos. Also some people lost emails whilst the DNS records changed but we told them this in advance to be careful and ask for important emails to be delayed until they got the ok. Also the interface will be too confusing for certain people , I have had someone storm in saying they have lost all their folders and saying how shocking it is etc all the emails have gone despite showing everyone where folders are.

 

Good luck

 

P.S. Password changes by default are 60 days so you may want to extend that if your doing it over the holidays :-)

 

If you setup a Hybrid first your emails wouldn't have got lost

[sonofsanta]

Honestly? No grief at all.

 

We migrated everyone (having asked, politely, if people could empty their Deleted Items as there was no point in porting those across) and for a couple of weeks were running on-site and in-cloud; in the Feb half term we then flipped the switch to delete on-site mailboxes and convert people fully to cloud.

 

The Monday morning, people had to run through the Outlook First Time wizard, which is Next - Next - tick box, type password - Next - Finish and never needs doing again.

 

That was it. The only problem we had was with personal contact groups; the details Outlook had cached were incorrect and would reject the email. Deleting the cached entry from the drop down in a new email then typing it out again fixed that.

 

No-one complained about the change in webmail interface, remarkably.

 

And I think that anyone who had any issues with is has been calmed down by the 15 free copies of Office they now have through it

 

Oh, and passwords: we had to make sure our minimum password length was 8 characters, and that's it. No expiry needed. Not even any need to update passwords that didn't meet that criteria; it only applies that when you go to change it. No problems at all.

Edited February 6, 2015 by sonofsanta

[FN-GM]

The Monday morning, people had to run through the Outlook First Time wizard, which is Next - Next - tick box, type password - Next - Finish and never needs doing again.

 

You can even get rid of that wizard with group policy.