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
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!

Matt Wolodarsky

Microsoft

Jan 10, 2017

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.

Loryan Strant

MVP

Jan 10, 2017

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.

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Office 365 Deployment Approach - Big Bang vs. Serialized Deployment

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