Page 249 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

might be as easy as a walk in the park. If you’re part of a thousand-person multi- national organization with offices around the world, then the process will be much more involved.
As you begin preparing, you will inevitably realize some deficiencies in your plan. Think of these steps as iterative. When you know more about what you should include in your plan, go back and update your plan. As you walk through the prep- aration phase, you will know more than you did during the planning phase. This is why an iterative process is so very important. You don’t know what you don’t know, and to think that you could plan everything without being all-knowing is a ridiculous thought.
DNS
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a standard used to let computers communi- cate over the Internet. For example, Microsoft manages the domain microsoft. com. All the Microsoft computers that are accessed over the Internet are part of this domain, and each is assigned a specific number, known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address. When you send an email to someone at Microsoft, your computer asks the microsoft.com DNS server which computer handles email.
When you move to Office 365, you must make changes in DNS so that network traffic understands where it should be routed. In essence, what happens is that when the DNS is changed, anyone sending you an email will have that email routed to your Office 365 implementation rather than to the current location.
Mailboxes
As you just discovered in the preceding section on DNS, there are specific comput- ers responsible for hosting your email. If you keep your email on your local com- puter, then you won’t have any email data to migrate. However, if you leave your email on the server, then all that data will need to be migrated to the Office 365 mailboxes. This migration can be one of the most technically difficult parts of moving email systems, but with guidance from a partner, it can be pain free.
Portals
A web portal, also known as an Intranet site, can be as simple as a static web page, or as complex as a fully integrated solution. SharePoint provides a tremendous amount of functionality, and it has seen massive adoption in the last decade. Office 365 includes SharePoint Online, which is nothing more than SharePoint hosted by Microsoft. During the migration phase of an implementation, you need to decide which content you want to move to SharePoint and which you can leave where it is currently located. In addition, you need to decide which functionality you want to integrate into your portal and which systems are better left in place.
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