COVID-19 has rocked the lives of many around the world.  In this post I am going to focus on some of the technical challenges related to Covid-19.  In doing so, we cannot discount the loss of life and the impacts this pandemic has had on people.  I hope this post find you and your family well.

The rapid adoption of technology in response to the pandemic required technologists to skip steps normally taken to vet technology.  In the first few weeks, companies reacted quickly to rapidly change pretty much every facet of working life to keep their businesses running.  Some of our systems simply didn’t cope or meet the needs of the new working environment.   As a result, many people flocked to solutions like Microsoft Teams without time for a lot of research.  This includes companies that had never adopted Office 365. 

As a migration specialist, I have already started to see a new problem: migration of the temporary solution to something permanent.

Microsoft Teams is powerful and extremely comprehensive.  Microsoft’s offer to extend this license to just about anyone for several months for free resulted in major adoption.  We all knew this was a calculated move, with most of us knowing that getting off Teams would be difficult.  With the extreme situation, the growth in Teams adoption has been remarkable and beyond my dreams.  Teams has allowed business to go on in the moment.  It acts as the phone, chat, file storage, external collaboration tool, and so much more.

Months later, with the crisis response more fully shaped, we must now make plans on what our path forward should be.  For some, staying on the current Teams platform isn’t right.  Let me dive into two scenarios that have popped up as examples. 

The Wrong Tenant

I have already run into the “wrong tenant” issue a few times.  Some organizations were not ready for the adoption of a solution like Teams but needed it.  A few out there, to limit risk, didn’t enable Teams in their “real” tenant.  Others have instances running in a shadow IT scenario, flying under the corporate radar.  Some companies had a tenant they were going to move to in time, but they were not ready and wanted to leave that tenant “clean”.  Some enabled a few users to get thorough the crisis, but ultimately had to enable the whole company.

Regardless of the path, the outcome is the same:  The company has Teams running in a tenant which isn’t their final tenant.

The Wrong Strategy

Some organizations adopted Teams because VPNs were not scaled for everyone at the company to work at home.  Suddenly a cloud solution was the only thing that could adapt and be rolled out quickly.  Also, many companies have on-prem strategies and are not ready for the adoption of a cloud-based solution.  This is a minority of companies, but also a very demanding group.  These companies now have VPNs ready and are anxious to get everyone back on prem and under control.  However, with a lot of employees being home for most of the year, these OnPrem systems are not meeting all the needs of this new distributed workforce.

What was supposed to be a solution for a few weeks, has now been in place for months without a clear end in sight.  The data in Teams isn’t just aiding in remote work, it is now critical business data.

API Issues & Limited Options

Sadly, API restrictions really make migrations difficult right now.  As of this writing, we still don’t have migration APIs.  To make it more complex, Teams doesn’t really match back to an On-Prem product.  This results in a very difficult situation for many companies.

If you are just in the wrong tenant, partial solutions exist.  However, it might not be easy to get funding in these difficult times.  When you add in the API limitations, a migration can be even harder.  Paying an unbudgeted expense for a partial migration is a difficult storey to tell.

Several other big questions exist in these decisions:

• Will all the data and history have or need a final home?
• Do I need to legally keep this data?
• Have I secured this environment?
• Can my users shift to yet another tool and process if I need to leave Teams?

Depending upon your answers, some companies are forced into a Teams Migration they never even thought about or planned for.  Many find the “we will just abandon this data” plan hastily implemented in March is no longer viable.  So much of our businesses have changed that this working data is our business now.

End Answer?

One thing is clear.  If Teams is here to stay for your company, it is important to get users into the right place as soon as possible.  If you are not going to keep Teams, turn it off as soon as possible and stop the damage. 

One thing we can all agree on is this: Microsoft’s calculation that people would adopt Teams and not be able to get off of it was a very good move for them.  Teams is here to stay for most organizations that adopted it.