11Jul
28May
Education and Governance: your weapons to combat fear and enable modern workplaces
I had lunch with a colleague recently who expressed skepticism over my (admittedly non-conventional) methods for migrating users from a legacy file server to OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint. "Some things work better in Theory than they do in Practice," he says. Well, that's funny because I built my method from actual...
02Apr
Moving to Microsoft 365 means getting to know your data (and your business)
Through my website's contact form, I still hear about botched migrations to Microsoft 365 on a regular basis. This is usually due to exactly one problem: ignorance about the process, as well as ignorance about the datasets being migrated, as well as ignorance about the various tools that we have...
26Oct
Cloud vs. On-prem and the future of Managed Services
Is the on-prem model (e.g. legacy AD with file shares, Windows Server-based apps, etc.) 'better' in some cases than SaaS alternatives like Microsoft 365, GSuite, Ping, Okta, Salesforce, DropBox, or whatever? In the SMB space, I really struggle to advocate for on-prem anymore, and I mean REALLY struggle. And that's...
04Mar
Migration paths to Microsoft 365: Devices before data??
I have literally written the book on this topic, but one question I did not directly address is the order in which you might migrate the various workloads from traditional infrastructure to Microsoft 365. First, just know that you can tackle your migration in whatever order works best for you, but...
19Feb
The importance of starting with OneDrive
I am going to make an argument that OneDrive is the most important application for you to focus on when starting a new migration of files to Microsoft 365. Not Teams, and not SharePoint. OneDrive. I recommend starting here for a variety of reasons--and maybe not all of the ones...
21Jan
Understanding file server migrations to Microsoft 365
In my opinion, there is only one viable migration path to move data from old file servers to Microsoft 365: it has to be a user-engaged migration. IT people always ask me about tools--stuff like the SharePoint migration tool or Microsoft's recent acquisition of mover.io, and there are even fancier...
28Dec
Reader Question: Can I sync my Network Drives to Teams?
Dear Alex, I wish to know if its possible to sync files/folders on my Network Server to teams. I have read a few documentations but all seems to be just for own PCs and not for Server/network drives. Yours is the closest I could see. Please can you help me...
18Apr
How to migrate company file shares and mapped drives to Office 365 using the SharePoint Migration Tool
I debated on writing about this tool for a long time. Because here's the thing: most file servers in production today are just huge garbage piles, built out of years of half-completed thoughts and haphazard document collaboration. Therefore, before we get into it, I first want to cover off on...
14Apr