Office 365 SharePoint Migration

SharePoint Online delivers a single, unified location in the cloud where your people can easily cooperate with team members to exchange ideas and expertise, build custom team and project sites and solutions, finding organizational resources, or information search. You can also invite external users to view, share, and collaborate using extranet site groups. In SharePoint Online service, Instead of deploying and managing SharePoint internally, SharePoint Online gives you a complete hosted SharePoint experience. You and your business users have anywhere access to the rich collaboration, information management and business intelligence capabilities of SharePoint.

iLink helps Organizations Migrate from earlier versions of Microsoft Office, Collaboration and Communication Products to Office 365 to enhance their Productivity and Collaboration in a dynamic fashion.

Read More: http://www.ilink-systems.com/Solutions/Office-365-Solutions/Office-365-SharePoint-Migration

Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365 Migration

Businesses migrate their Lotus Notes based Mail, Applications and Workflows to Exchange, SharePoint / Office 365 to transform an organization to become more agile, productive and cost-effective. Organizations are focused on making the most of their technology investment. Consolidating to a single vendor solution platform for email, collaboration, employee engagement within the organization has become a priority for most organizations that used Lotus Notes.  Increasingly organizations have started seeing Lotus Notes as an unnecessary expense that does not fit into their larger business strategy. Cost reduction through a single platform and readily available support for the platform from Microsoft are the drivers for organizations to migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. This helps them avail improved functionality, attracting and retaining talented employees and becoming more nimble and connected.

At a high-level an organization gets the following business benefits through migration from Lotus Notes to SharePoint or Office 365:

• Cost Reduction through reducing user training and improving user productivity
• Capability enhancement through SharePoint FAST search, Tight integration with Office 365 and Microsoft Office apps and SharePoint Workflow templates that provide faster workflows than Lotus Notes.
• Consistent and Easier Workflows - Enhanced Workflow Platform as Microsoft has a Workflow foundation that works the same way across a range of products.
• Long term business strategy – facilitating business goals such as innovation, agility, mobility, attracting and retaining talent, mergers and acquisitions. Microsoft products clearly score over Lotus Notes in fast tracking these business goals.

iLink has helped organizations migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365. iLink has successfully used migration tools like the Dell OnDemand Migration tool, Quest, AvePoint, MetaLogix Migration Manager and Microsoft’s Online Notes Inspector (MONTI).

iLink’s Migration methodology typically comprises of the following:

• Pre-migration analysis
• Migration strategy focusing on key facets such as
  • Gaining access to SharePoint features such as managed metadata and document sets
  • Using native web services, connect to SharePoint / Office 365 sites
  • Preserving the look and feel of Notes applications and cover Notes forms to Microsoft InfoPath list forms
  • Moving Notes data to SQL Server tables
  • Discovering Notes databases, analyzing how they are used and determine which applications are unused, as well as those applications that will need development
  • Using a customizable rules-based engine, specify target locations and migration jobs, hundreds of which can be migrated
  • Inhabit lists, libraries, sites and subsites based on existing Notes infrastructure
  • Maintain data fidelity when migrating rich text and complex application data, as well as preservation of data including keyword fields
  • Choice of document destinations beyond lists and libraries, including wiki pages, basic pages, and content publishing pages
  • For applications requiring custom form layouts, migrate Notes documents to InfoPath XML documents

iLink has migrated Lotus Notes Mail, Applications and Workflows to SharePoint using Quest for a Global Chemical Distributor and a Healthcare Insurance Provider. iLink has migrated complex Lotus Notes Mail, Applications and Workflows to SharePoint using MetaLogix Migration Manager for a global online retail platform.

iLink has created some standard pre-migration analysis and migration templates apart from a comparison matrix of using various migration tools. Through these templates and a standardized migration methodology iLink provides a faster turnaround as well as qualitative migration and support to various customers who migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365.

HUB Intranet Product

Intranets of the previous era faced challenges such as being static, offering a non-intuitive user experience, a painful search experience and were a set of disintegrated systems.  IT departments in various organizations faced challenges such as inability to scale or allow a geographically distributed workforce to collaborate in real time.  Various departments in organizations functioned as silos in terms of collaboration, knowledge sharing and engaging with each other to improve productivity.

Whilst Content is still the key, trends such as Social Mobility Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) have changed the Intranet paradigm to move to a dynamic and responsive Intranet that institutionalizes sustained user adoption to usher in a cultural change and produce an engaged workforce with the ability to collaborate in real time even separated by geo physical distances.

The advent of social media has triggered the advent of various social channels even within companies that could be leveraged to become a productivity driver.  Mobile devices have made user access to Intranet possible anywhere anytime on any device.  Cloud computing has ensured that organizations are able to scale their applications elastically and not worry about on premise infrastructure and associated maintenance costs.  Analytics has provided the power to users to dynamically analyze any business problem in terms of the dimensions and drivers.

iLink's Next Generation HUB Intranet Product creates a seamless, engaging and personalized experience that makes users feel welcome, encourages them to contribute freely, enables them find / access what they need and allows them to stay informed, regardless of where or how they do it.

iLink’s HUB Intranet Product is a next-generation employee engagement platform available on the cloud and on premise.  It helps customers replace the conventional intranet with a state of the art,  fully configurable & social intranet – a platform where your employees can innovate, network, collaborate, converse and engage.

iLink's HUB Intranet Product is an extensible, feature rich, modern UI based product that can facilitate collaboration across a mobile and flexible workforce, can provide a dynamic space for content and employee interaction, is easy to use and inexpensive to maintain. 

HUB Intranet Product has been envisioned with a larger goal of not only improving productivity and making employees efficient but cutting through organizational barriers and strategically supporting new ways of working.

HUB Intranet Product leverages social engagement by integrating with Yammer, Confluence, Blogs and Social Feeds.  HUB is built on Office 365 / SP 2013 and provides an engaging and responsive User Experience.  HUB leverages predictive analytics for analyzing various business problems.

HUB Intranet Product  has a planned roadmap that continuously augments the product with latest technology and business trends.

For more information on HUB, browse the URL http://www.ilink-systems.com/Services/hub-intranet

Office 365 Exchange Migration

Exchange Online is a hosted email solution that gives users functionalities such as email, calendar, tasks and contacts. These functionalities are delivered as cloud-based services and users can access them via PCs, web and mobile devices . It gives administrators a rich environment where they have access to Active Directory and can implement group policies and more. This cloud based service is hosted and run by Microsoft in its data centers all over the world.
Like any other migration, organizations moving to Office 365 Exchange Online from their existing email environment need to do it in a careful and planned way to ensure success and minimize problems and downtime. Exchange Online migration will require not only a detailed, well-thought out plan, but also personnel who are skilled in Exchange, security, Active Directory, DNS, firewalls, networking, group policies and more. iLink has this expertise and has successfully implemented Exchange Migration projects at a number of clients, large and small, in a variety of industries. Therefore iLink is ready and well-equipped to take on your Exchange Online migration project and drive it to a successful conclusion, ensuring your complete satisfaction.

iLink specializes in Office 365 Exchange Online migration and follows the approach mentioned below:

• Current Exchange cleanup as required
• Follow and implement security requirements
• Upgrade Outlook where necessary
• Domain name

• User provisioning, data migration
• Single sign-on, authentication
• Group policies, and much more

The approach followed also covers scenarios such as: staged or cutover migration, rich co-existence with free/busy sharing, DLP (Data Loss Prevention) and Retention Policies, Multi Forest migration, Re-routing (Postini, Barracuda, etc.), Mobile Provisioning (Mobile Iron, Good, Sophos), AD cleanup and consolidation, AD Functional Upgrade, and more.

iLink's Office 365 Exchange Migration focuses on the following considerations

• Develop and follow a plan and timeline
• Customize and integrate with other software and systems as needed
• Minimize downtime, if any, and no loss of data

Based on the initial assessment, iLink recommends a suitable Exchange Migration strategy, gets customer buy-in and then focuses on flawless and on-time execution. In addition, iLink follows best practices, tools and guidelines provided by Microsoft for Office 365 Exchange Migration.

iLink's Office 365 Exchange Migration relies on the following migration pillars for success

• Developing a complete, detailed migration plan that identifies critical steps, resources, timelines and any unique requirements or customizations needed
• Engaging experienced, competent personnel with expertise in the technologies and steps involved
• Setting appropriate and realistic expectations, especially regarding timelines
• Periodic checkpoints for reviewing progress
• 100% customer satisfaction

iLink has extensive experience and expertise in overall Office 365 assessment, planning and deployment. And, in particular, iLink has successfully completed Exchange and SharePoint Online migrations with several large and small customers. These projects have included many different kinds of technologies where iLink developed, as required, customized solutions to fit the exact customer needs. For a high-level overview of iLink’s Office 365 solution offerings, please visit: http://www.ilink-systems.com/Technology/Office-365

Office 365 SharePoint Collaboration

Collaboration is a key factor in many successful things we do in life and at work.  For this blog, I will stick to work scenarios.  Companies create collaborative environments for their employees to work and be successful.  They build or rent office space for employees to work together.  They set up telecommunication equipment, computers, networks, etc. for employees to communicate with one another and work successfully.  Thanks to the internet, I can say we live in a very connected world.  I am a relatively new employee to iLink-Systems, as part of my first project I had to collaborate with a development team in India.  It messed up my sleep pattern a little, but it was an exhilarating experience to work with a team half-way across the world. We were sharing ideas and information about the project. We leveraged Microsoft Lync, Skype, Outlook and SharePoint. These tools blurred the distance between our physical locations.  If only we can do something about the time zone, well, we will discuss that in another blog.  We were developing iLink-System's first Office 365 SharePoint intranet product for North Coast Electric in Seattle.

I am going to muse a little about SharePoint Online and its ability to collaborate.  Collaboration is one of the core tenet's of SharePoint.  SharePoint Collaboration brings together people, processes, information and guess what, it has social networking too.  How does it do it? 

In an intranet, SharePoint Online once configured,

• -          Can display updated employee and organization information using My Sites.  It is everyone's favorite to be aware of "Who is who" by using SharePoint Online People Search. Employees can upload their picture, update their profile information, and talk about their hobbies & interests.  They can also be aware of colleagues that share common interests.  Links to blogs can be shared with everyone.
• -          Documents, documents, documents.  We have documents everywhere.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a manageable solution that allows us to store it in a central location and access it from anywhere? Document management is definitely made easy in SharePoint.  Documents can be created, stored and version controlled with ease.  There is no need to map to some obscure network drive to access a document. In fact, one does not need to be on the corporate network to have access to documents.  Having documents in a central SharePoint location eliminates the possibility of having outdated versions sitting all over the network.  Gone are the days of sending documents as bulky email attachments, just email the link. 
• -          Even though we are in a connected world we might not have access to the internet at all times.  No problems, save your documents locally with a click of a button, make the edits, and synchronize when internet is available.
• -          Sharing information becomes a no-brainer by setting Alerts.  Alerts can be sent to individuals or groups when new documents are created or when changes are made to existing documents. 
• -          Multiple people can co-author a single document at the same time and see immediate results. 
• -          Teams working on projects can have their private site to share, discuss and store information.  Team meetings can be held using Lync Online. PC-to-PC audio, video and screen sharing enables collaboration.  Meeting notes can be captured with One Note Web Application.  Tasks can be created, assigned and tracked in real-time.  When the meeting is done all the information is readily available for everyone right there.
• -          Employees have opinions and valuable ideas.  SharePoint Online can capture them using discussion boards.
• -          Company information from disparate systems can be made available within SharePoint
• -          Workflows can be designed and integrated to improve efficiencies.  Processes such as approvals can be made seamless.  When an approval is required, the right people get notified to get the task done.
• -          Social Networking functionality is integrated within SharePoint.  Employees can tag, comment, create notes and follow common interests.  Companies can integrate social networking sites such as, Facebook, Twitter etc. into their intranet.  Discussion boards are a great way to get feedback and get conversations going on different topics.
• -          User access can be configured to be as granular as needed.

 As you can see much collaboration can be achieved using SharePoint.  To me, it is a tool that can be used to achieve maximum efficiency through proper implementation and good user adoption.