Guest post from Mark Kirstein, BitTitan VP of Products
There’s no denying the ever-increasing ubiquity of Microsoft Office 365, including the expanding reach of the Microsoft Teams unified communications and collaboration platform. Latest growth data from the Redmond giant indicate that more than half a million organizations and enterprises have adopted Teams, including an astounding 91 percent of Fortune 100 companies. That number will certainly climb as more end users migrate to the Office 365 suite. By the end of 2018, Microsoft Teams had surpassed chief rival Slack in usage, with adoption expected to double by 2020.
These figures present not only new IT and service-provider challenges but a potentially unclear path for how to seamlessly handle the increasing number of Teams migration instances for the new workplace-messaging software. While it promises to increase user capability, the absence of a working model for Teams migration success can create massive migraines for MSPs and IT staff.
Teams’ ability to offer reliable workplace chat, video conferencing, file storage and application integration is definitely a boon for business and has quickly shot Teams to the front of the pack as a key application in Office 365. While the service fully integrates with the subscription office-productivity suite and features extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products, IT pros are hopefully expecting to be able to easily migrate Teams tenants and content in much the same way other Office 365 services are moved.
As with migrating any new software, that will be easier said than done. Fortunately, progress is being made.
One solution is the deployment of BitTitan’s MigrationWiz, which as of July 9, has added significantly new capabilities to handle Teams tenant migrations quickly, easily and more securely. The new MigrationWiz capabilities also help address the scope of the various migration scenarios, as well as provide comprehensive transitions to new tenants that enable an easy, fast and secure migration at scale of one Teams instance to another. With MigrationWiz, service providers are now able to deliver additional services to customers while answering a key market need ahead of mainstream adoption and offerings from other cloud migration competitors.
With these expanded capabilities, MSPs and IT pros can deploy MigrationWiz to migrate a Teams instance and the individual components, including Teams, Channels, Conversations, Permissions and Files within that instance. Additionally, IT staff can conduct a pre-migration Teams assessment for this scenario in MigrationWiz to analyze the number of Teams, amount of data and number of users requiring migration, which can aid in gauging critical aspects of the migration project, including timelines and number of licenses required – all leading to better estimates of overall project costs.
“We were at a critical juncture with Teams migration for our digital workplace strategic plan,” said Jim Banach, Practice Group Lead at New Signature. “We needed to pull the trigger on a large IT transformation project that included a major migration between Office 365 tenants and we needed assurance that critical data and information inside Teams would be preserved for our users. It looked murky for how we could proceed, especially since there are limited options in the marketplace. That said, we employed BitTitan’s MigrationWiz and it enabled us to deploy a comprehensive transition with significantly better data fidelity, security and cost-savings.”
2019 has become the year of data migration – from not only on-premises-to-cloud migrations, but also with significant growth in cloud-to-cloud migrations, and capability innovation. This is likely the first year that we’ll see more of those migrations than traditional migration scenarios.
It will pay to ponder several general best-practice migration points, from barriers and protections, to strategies and ways to optimize upcoming migration projects. Broadly, foresight and planning will help smooth the migration path, and will ultimately provide your enterprise with better ability to focus on core strengths that will help grow and maximize your business – rather than migration headaches that can diminish your operation. Emerging are innovative migration and automation capabilities that are more secure, flexible and at a lower cost to those who know what they want to accomplish and can plan accordingly.
Microsoft Teams is among those innovative new capabilities, and its rapid adoption is a testament to its enterprise power. Stay ahead of the adoption curve – take the necessary steps to adequately prepare and lean on the expertise offered by solutions such as MigrationWiz to fully support your impending migration.
See our post last month: BitTitan Launches Microsoft Teams Migration Solution.
Mark Kirstein is the Vice President, Products at BitTitan, leading product development and product management teams for the company’s SaaS solutions. Prior to BitTitan, Mark served as the Senior Director of Product Management for the Mobile Enterprise Software division of Motorola Solutions, continuing in that capacity following its acquisition by Zebra Technologies in 2014. Kirstein has over two decades of experience overseeing product strategy, development, and go-to-market initiatives. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from California Polytechnic State University.
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