Page 247 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

SharePoint is using email. If you’re new to SharePoint, then you’re in for a treat because you gain an understanding of how the product integrates with email. For more on SharePoint, check out Part 3.
Account provisioning and licensing
The good news is that Office 365 is very flexible in licensing, user provisioning, and administration. With that said, however, you want to plan out the number of users and the licensing requirements you need for your organization. You may choose to adopt Office 365 all at once or as a phased approach by moving a single group over to Office 365 as a pilot. In either case, you need to understand your licensing requirements so that you can plan resources and costs accordingly. The plus side of a subscription-based model is that you can add licenses as you need them or remove them when you don’t. Before subscription-based pricing, you had to spend a lot of money for licensing whether you used it or not. Those days are gone.
Internet bandwidth consideration
Because Office 365 lives in the cloud and is accessed over the Internet, your con- nection must be top-notch. Your network administrator or IT consultant can use a number of different network bandwidth testing tools so that you have firsthand reports on how much bandwidth you’re currently using in your organization and how moving to the cloud will affect the users.
Software and hardware inventories
Undertaking an audit of your current software and hardware resources is impor- tant. Fortunately, Microsoft has a tool available for just such a task. It is called the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit, it is updated frequently, and it can be downloaded by searching for it in the Microsoft Download Center located at www.microsoft.com/download.
After you have a handle on the software and hardware in your organization, you need to reference the requirements for Office 365 to determine if you need to make changes. Refer to Chapter 17 for Office 365 software and hardware requirements.
Administrator and end-user training
As with any new system, training is a required element. Office 365 has been designed with intuitive user interfaces for both administration and end users, but without a training plan, you’re rolling the dice. A popular and successful approach to training when it comes to intuitive designs is called “train the trainer.” The idea being that you invest in formal training for a power user and then that user trains the rest of the company. This strategy is very effective even for large
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