New Collaboration and Content Options in Office 365

Our previous post, Liberating Notes/Domino-based Resources, identified the types of collaboration and content resources that can be most productively modernized and migrated from legacy Notes/Domino deployments. In this post, we briefly survey the leading targets (i.e., destination platforms and services) for migration projects.

Several years ago, the migration patterns were straightforward: Notes/Domino enterprise messaging (email and calendaring/scheduling) were usually migrated to Exchange, while other Domino platform-based resources were routinely triaged and migrated to SharePoint (or abandoned, sometimes with considerable information and application resource waste).

Exchange/SharePoint migrations continue to be a popular pattern, but several recent developments have expanded the overall migration target mix:

• Cloud platforms such as Office 365 and Microsoft Azure are rapidly gaining momentum, and SharePoint Online, the version of SharePoint available in Office 365, differs from the traditional on-premises SharePoint in some important respects (e.g., in the range of custom application development features supported)
• There’s also a back-to-basics trend in collaboration and content tools and services, in many respects driven by user experiences with popular consumer-oriented services for file sharing and group projects; Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Office 365 Groups are two important examples of new options that successfully adapt the simplicity and accessibility of consumer-oriented services for enterprise domains
• A third recent change involves the accessibility and cost-effectiveness of cloud database services, combined with powerful yet easy-to-use data analysis and visualization tools such as Microsoft Power BI; in the past, database management system (DBMS) cost and complexity were often blockers, but now it’s often more compelling to migrate Notes/Domino lists to SharePoint lists, Excel Services, or SQL Server (on-premises or as Azure SQL Database), and to access the migrated data from leading-edge tools such as Power BI
• Another subtle but significant shift involves the new Office Graph technology used in Office 365, which provides an innovative and enterprise-focused (e.g., with pervasive permission-based access control) option, when used through new tools such as Office Delve, for people searching for domain-specific information resources and experts

Overall, these market dynamics adapt the familiarity, power, and simplicity of consumer-oriented services (such as Facebook, Twitter, and Web search) for enterprise needs. They also make powerful database and data analytics/visualization tools much more cost-effectively available, with significantly reduced learning curves. People familiar with Excel, for example, can easily learn to leverage Power BI — assuming relevant data resources are made available to them.

What’s not to like? Microsoft has delivered an impressive set of new collaboration and content options, with Office 365, Microsoft Azure, and ongoing refinements to their on-premises software products. A key challenge remains, however: how do you get there from here? That is, how can organizations efficiently, securely, and cost-effectively migrate their legacy deployments to the new Microsoft services and tools? That’s the topic for our next couple posts (spoiler alert: you can explore the CASAHL DART product suite in the meantime, if you’re eager to know the answer).

Please also consider visiting us in the exhibit hall (booth #619) at the Microsoft Ignite conference in early May, if you’re making the trip to Chicago for Ignite. Our migration experts will be there, ready to share insights from the thousands of successful migration projects CASAHL has undertaken over the last several years.