A Nightmare on 365 Street
October 31st, 2018 by Chris Colden
Halloween is the time of the year for ghoulish costumes, pumpkin carving and trick-or-treating. It’s also a time for scary stories, and we thought we would share some of ours.
During our time working with Office 365 and Microsoft Cloud services we’ve encountered our fair share of horror stories which could have been avoided. What follows is a series of short tales we like to call… “A Nightmare on 365 Street”.
Story 1 – Migration mess
One customer had such a bad deployment that they backed out of Office 365, tried to migrate to G Suite and failed, which left them in quite a state. They engaged with us to attempt the Office 365 migration again. Since that deployment they are now rolling out Office 365 to other regions around the world.
Story 2 – The tenant with the wrong name
The customer was already leveraging Office 365 for Skype for Business, however they wanted to take advantage of Exchange Online and SharePoint. The issue here was that the customer had created a tenant with the wrong name but already put live users on it. The tenant name becomes apparent when using SharePoint to share documents with external parties, and therefore needed to change it. As there is no rename functionality, or any way to perform a tenant to tenant migration we had to create a new one and swing users over to it. If the planning was done correctly this costly mistake could have been avoided.
Story 3 – Premature licence provision
The customer was performing a cross forest migration and had licenced synchronised users in Office 365 before the target domain was aware it had a mailbox in the other domain. This caused Office 365 to provision a mailbox for the user, so once the mailbox was migrated to the target domain, the user effectively had two mailboxes – one on premises, and another one in the Cloud. Giving the user a licence after the mailbox had been migrated would have avoided delays to the project as we had to wait 30 days before a mailbox is fully purged out of Office 365 before the correct mailbox could be moved into the cloud. It also came with all the associated man hours to straighten it all out safely.
So, who you gonna call?
Ghostbusters may not have been able to help in these instances; however our Office 365 experts could have avoided any nightmares. We’ve helped many businesses and organisations make a successful move to the Cloud.
The journey starts with an understanding of your requirements and a discovery of current systems such as Active Directory and Exchange, so informed high-level decisions can be made. Following the initial discovery, a high-level design is produced and reviewed with your in-house team to ensure the solution meets your business needs and feedback can be captured.
Upon the review of the high-level design a low-level design is produced, which looks at everything from invalid characters in Active Directory, to Exchange configuration including items such Dynamic Distribution Lists. Once approved BrightCloud will enable your team to move services to the cloud in a logical manor with minimal disruption to your everyday business.
