Forum Discussion
MicrosoftOffice 365 Deployment Approach - Big Bang vs. Serialized Deployment
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!
Some workloads like Exchange are generally big bang albeit in hybrid so at a pace that works for the customer. Certain aspects of SharePoint would be big-bang like an intranet landing page, but team sites would be more serialised.
Workloads that fundamentally change how people do something (eg. communicate) such as Yammer or Teams we tend to break down into smaller chunks.
Again - very specific to the customer as in some instances we've done org-wide deployments of Yammer in a big bang approach.
- Matt Wolodarsky
Thanks Loryan. To clarify my reference to big bang vs. serialized, I am asking about deployment of Office 365 workloads - i.e., do you deploy all Office 365 workloads at the same time or in a serial fashion; rather than rollout strategy across a user base.
- Gotcha. It's unrealistic to go big bang unless you're dealing with a startup. Implementing so many diverse workloads would result in change fatigue.
Our approach is to do the more common / mission-critical workloads first such as Exchange & ProPlus, then things like Skype for Business or OneDrive for Business due to their relative simplicity, then move along to things that are more complex and challenging such as SharePoint/Teams/Yammer.
We tend to work on a quarterly implementation cycle per product.- Matt Wolodarsky
Thanks Loryan. I appreciate the perspective.
We've heard from a number of customers that there are significant benefits from deploying all workloads at once, including many of our larger customers who want to take advantage of the synnergies from scenarios that cross multiple workloads. A lot of the value in Office 365 are scenarios that enable users to leverage capabilities across the suite. Many also found it less disruptive to their end users to touch them once with a big bang, rather than multiple touches for the various workloads.
To your point, I can see for some customers how a serialized approach may be preferred.
