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Matt Wolodarsky's avatar
Matt Wolodarsky
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jan 10, 2017
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Office 365 Deployment Approach - Big Bang vs. Serialized Deployment

Hi - I am interested in getting feedback from this group regarding how they have approached rolling out Office 365 to their end users.  Did your organization follow a big bang approach (i.e., deploye...
  • Mike Rowland's avatar
    Mike Rowland
    Jan 19, 2017

    We've deployed big bang - as being a large organisation it takes us quite a while to mobilise for change so multiple change / deployment events just wouldn't work for us.

     

    So currently if you drop onto our pilot you move fully into 365 world running all workloads, EXO, SPO, SFB and also cloud migrated mail.  The only future difference will be you'll also get a new Win10 device at the same time.

     

    Adoption has been smooth but we've had dedicated resource providing a hand over experience to each user - they get about 30 minutes to bring them up to speed with the new features but we're finding now we have plenty of people on the platform that users are learning by osmosis.

     

    Any issues we've had have been entirely related to co-existence with legacy systems rather than any issues with 365 itself!

C_the_S's avatar
C_the_S
Bronze Contributor
Jan 10, 2017

We are in the midst of a serialized deployment.

We did SharePoint first, then Exchange. Next up will be Office 2016.

 

We are a company of ~100 and not a lot of sophisticated techies in the user base so it was felt it would be easier to do it a chunk at a time as I'm primarily the person in charge of Office365 and do those roll outs myself (except for the upcoming Office 2016).

 

Except for email, nothing else from Office 365 has been embraced by the user base. As we still have on-prem network shares that's where most of the work is done.

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