In the first six months of 2017, we migrated the State of Minnesota to Microsoft Office 365 government cloud (O365). This included more than 40,000 Identity, Skype, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint accounts and sites that would be migrated on concurrent schedules. An absolute completion deadline of May 31 created a sense of urgency for everyone connected to the project.

The move to O365 required significant preparations in order to minimize disruption to our customers in the executive branch and one county. The bulk of the preparation lasted from March 2016 through December 2016, when MNIT and Microsoft resources tested and created custom code that would allow email boxes to exist in two locations – in the existing dedicated environment and the future O365 environment.

The approach required the team to find a method that would allow email, calendars, contacts, and collaboration spaces to co-exist between two separate environments until the migration was complete – no simple task given the complexity and size of our environment. Ultimately, the solution we selected allowed the login information for every employee to be duplicated, confirmed and validated in the new environment which paved the way for all of the services to be moved (Email, SharePoint, OneDrive, etc).

The timeline felt relentless – each week thousands of email boxes had to move to stay on track with the completion date. The team pushed the boundaries and found an approach to go beyond the Microsoft recommended maximum of 2,000 mailboxes being migrated each week. In fact, the state hit a high watermark of 9,000 mailboxes in one week, a new record for both Microsoft and MNIT.

To prepare collaboration sites for the move, more than 60 team members worked on the project, engaging many agencies and evaluating sites in terms of our overall risk profile — were sites highly complex, did they need simple updates or a major overhaul, or did they need to be deleted altogether? Ultimately, we were able to delete nearly two-thirds of the sites, a significant risk reduction.

Communications

Throughout the entire O365 project, we communicated with end-users multiple times during each wave so they knew what to expect and what they needed to do. We sent out more than 132,000 email messages on precise schedules for the Outlook and Skype portion of the project. Technical liaisons at our agency offices also coordinated communications during every step of the project.

User Experience, Adoption and Training

Extensive training was required to make sure every user in the state could access their accounts once migrated. As part of this undertaking, we leveraged MNIT and agency partner staff within each of the agencies, who became “floor helpers.” Floor helpers attended training sessions presented primarily via Skype before migration. They were available on the day the migration occurred, and their purpose was to literally walk the floors of agencies and make sure users were able to login to their email accounts. This helped to minimize the downtime, and allowed daily business to continue. Technical staff convened the morning of every migration to get progress updates from the floor helpers and provide immediate assistance to them if they needed more help on the floor, or if there were login issues that required more technical expertise to resolve. This approach turned out to be a critical success factor in migrating over 40,000 users with minimal impact.

More than 600 early adopters and floor helpers attended 11 training sessions and there were over 820 views of the demo recordings. The total number of attendees was actually much higher, because some agencies viewed the sessions from conference rooms with a large group of attendees.

There were 49,235 hits and 21,550 unique visits to our extranet site, created especially for all end users. It gave them access to Quick Guides and other training information. The site is still available and state employees continue to check for updates and instructions on how to use the new features.

Throughout the course of the project, the technical teams were challenged with finding the best approaches to minimize the impact to users, because a project of this magnitude had never been attempted before. With everyone’s tremendous effort, we met the deadline of May 31, 2017.

What we Learned

Project managers are the glue that kept everything together, kept all the moving parts moving in the right direction, and made sure we all knew the plans. They helped leverage our strengths and connections between the multiple fast paced projects.

Our technical teams know our systems and environments backwards and forwards, and they were ready to take on the massive challenge of migrating an entire state. Countless hours and untold efforts were spent planning and implementing this migration successfully.

If you want to make sure migrations are smooth and seamless, it takes a great deal of planning and collaboration on all fronts. From technical teams and floor helpers, to tech liaisons, project managers and communicators, to usability experts, business analysts and quality assurance analysts, everyone worked tirelessly from the beginning to make sure the interruptions to business were minimal.

We learned that there’s no such thing as too much communication. For each batch of migrations, we sent out email messages 10 days in advance of the switchovers, then five working days before, the day before and the day the new environment went live. We told users what would happen and when, what to expect, and what would be different (no surprises!). Organized scheduling and close collaboration with the technical teams are essential to successful communications.

Instructions and user guides are really GOOD things to have available! All our communications and training sessions included links to detailed instructions and a contact person if they had questions.

Change can be difficult, and the personal touch goes a long way when you’re making big changes. Having a team of people physically on site during the migrations was key to helping us troubleshoot email issues immediately, and isolate any problem areas. We designed colorful badges and posters to identify helpers and their stations, and placed instruction guides at workstations. Some agency offices chose to greet their employees at the door instead with instruction guides and a friendly smile.