Moving to the Cloud Montgomery County’s transition to Office 365

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

Driven by critical business, technical and security challenges, Montgomery County (Maryland) Government (MCG) upgraded its Enterprise e-mail, Office productivity and collaboration solution to Microsoft Office 365. This six month initiative involved technical certification of approach, planning and coordination with 40 County Government departments, and the migration of 11,500 e-mail mailboxes across three generations of Microsoft Office products: 2003, 2007, and 2010. Accomplishing this project required intense technical planning and flawless execution of a complex project strategy. In addition, briefings of IT support staff coupled with comprehensive websites (packed with information), were used to market, provide instructions, and disseminate critical training and communications all during the project. These efforts supported a staggered migration approach in which groups of departments successfully migrated to Office 365 each week, until all were moved. All mailboxes were flawlessly migrated, none reverted and migration related support calls were minimal. With over 23,000 website visits and 5,500 training video views, these resources – developed in-house by the Department of Technology Services (DTS) and the Office of Human Resources Change Management team proved to be extremely valuable. Future phases of this project will entail driving user adoption of the full Office 365 suite of applications and capabilities.