Hey Eric,
This is not the normal experience form my own perspective, but each company and person has their own path they take when moving to the cloud.
I am sure my experience is a bit different as I am typically partnering with clients to help them get into O365, and as such I got through the migration and learning path many times a year.
Essentially there are two areas that seems to maybe be causing issues for you:
- Performance to access the O365 services for you and your users from the network.
- Knowledge of how the applications and systems work.
For the first one, there is not allot that you are going to find help with here. We can provide advice and options for you to help look into the problem, but ultimately diagnosing speed and performance issues is something that can only be done in your own offices/network/setup.
A few things to look at, make sure you are not having any issues with your local firewires or restrictions blocking IPs, or the ports O365 users. The list of IPs is so long you cant hope to keep them whitelisted (and it constantly is updating/changing), but here they are for reference. If you notice in the same document you will see ports listed that the different services use
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/urls-and-ip-address-ranges
The second option is something this community hopefully can help you with. I have typically had problems when I have had clients just enable and mast deploy technologies on their users. There needs to be a hand holding/training/gradual roll out to help transition the users. I would also strongly encourage some sort of formal training/office hours/assistance that your users can consume. I personally like the more direct training, but even a flushed out knowledge center/available online resource should help.
I have a few suggestions which will hopefully help:
Fastrack is a resource Microsoft users to migrate large customers to O365. While you have to be big to get into the program, everyone has access to the resources. Here is a GREAT adoption guide that can hopefully give you some ideas and help you address some of your users concern - https://devfasttrackv4storage.blob.core.windows.net/marketing/en-us/resources/Office_365_Adoption_Gu...
Microsoft has an online virtual academy that can be used to help train/learn O365.
- https://mva.microsoft.com/product-training/office_365
Finally there are great companies out there that have courses/resources/expertise doing/assisting with exactly what you are going through. The path to the cloud is bumpy at times, but the long term benefits and gains are huge. Done be afraid if you can swing it looking into any number of experts or additional resources that have the experience doing what you are doing now, and can give you a leg up!
Goodluck, I promise long term the ride gets easier, and getting into the cloud makes your life easier overall, you just have to get on boarded, and learn how things have changed, but stick with it, try to get your connectivity/network issues addressed, and keep asking here for help if you need!
adam
