Hopefully, you know by now that as an existing Microsoft Online Services customer, your subscription will be transitioned to the equivalent Office 365 suite or service after it becomes available. In anticipation of these upcoming changes, I wanted to provide some resources on what will be happening, what steps you will need to take, and what you can expect during the transition process.

The transition process itself will be automatic. However, there are a few things you should do to prepare.

Recommendation #1: Download the transition guide

This guide is your go-to resource for all questions you might have related to your transition. Make sure to review this comprehensive overview to get a better understanding of the tasks you need to complete, the scheduling process, the system requirements for each of the products within the Office 365 suite, information on the transition experience for the administrator and your end-users, as well as detailed checklists to help you plan.

I am calling out suggested resources with specific details within the transition guide that you should read:

• Detailed transition checklist
• Transition experience for customers
• Key decisions and actions

You can download the guide at any time.

Recommendation #2: Watch the Office 365 transition video

This video explains the overall transition process to Office 365—the future of collaboration, communications and online productivity. The video is in English, but the presentation used within the video is available in other languages.

Recommendation #3: Keep your team informed - create a distribution list
The best way to keep your team updated about the transition is to generate a distribution list for all the key technical contacts in your organization. Create a unique alias for this list, and use the alias as your contact preference within Microsoft Online Services. Get started right away by adding your distribution list to your contact information on the Microsoft Online Services Administration Consol.

Recommendation #4: Be sure you know the Office 365 system requirements

Depending on your current desktop configuration, updates may be required to enable some of the Office 365 features. Check out the system requirements for more information on features such as synchronization of on-premises mailboxes and Active Directory, configuration services for Single Sign-On, and re-delegation for your email domain (MX Record) to enable email.

Recommendation #5: Always stay up to date
The transition center web site at www.bpostransition.com is the place to learn anything and everything about the transition process. Do you have questions still? Join the conversation in the transition forum.

Next steps

Over the next few months you will be hearing from Microsoft again with another update and this will include a personalized survey to let us know approx. when transitioning will work for your business. Once your business has filled out the survey, we will send you an email to your email address contacts on file – including the technical contact email address - to let you know about your scheduled transition date. This is why it is very important to ensure that your technical contact information is both up to date, and to add a transition distribution alias as this contact. It will help to ensure that we are communicating to the right folks in your organization to make this as seamless as possible.

Is this helpful? Do you need other information? Let me know by providing a comment to this blog post.

Michael O’Neill