Onboarding Guide for new CSP partners

Onboarding Guide for new CSP partners

Contents Generating leads and making sales... 3 Leads... 3 Sales... 4 Upselling and attaching services to Office 365... 4 Onboarding... 5 Reducing the cost of acquisition... 5 Forget Greenfield: All customers are migrating from other solutions... 5 Build a viable plan: Account for the each of the onboarding tasks... 6 Minimize manual onboarding tasks: Automation is essential to quicker profit... 10 Drive a reliable cost model: Develop a solution that results in a fixed, per-user cost... 12 Support options... 12 Self-service... 13 Professional service... 14 Hybrid... 15 Migrating your existing customers from legacy hosted Exchange to Office 365... 16 Off-boarding strategies... 16 BitTitan onboarding and migration solutions... 18 BitTitan Insights: Best-in-class CSP leads... 18 BitTitan Sales Automation: Generates profitable pitch scenarios... 19 BitTitan UserActivation for CSP: Premier self-service Office 365 onboarding solution for SMBs... 19 BitTitan MigrationWiz: Industry leading onboarding platform... 20 BitTitan DeploymentPro: Automated Outlook desktop deployment and configuration... 22 BitTitan Health Check: Quantifies customers environment compatibility for Office 365... 22 BitTitan contact info/about BitTitan... 23

This document is a strategy and planning guide written for Microsoft Cloud Service Providers (CSP) business and engineering decision makers who need to understand how to transition to an Office 365 platform. This document will discuss the end-to-end life cycle of the Office 365 onboarding process, including: Leads and sales. Use business data and analytics to generate leads that are well-positioned to migrate to Office 365. Then optimize your offerings and pitch based on that data. Upsell and attachment. Learn about your customer s business needs and IT infrastructure. With this information, sell Office 365 messaging to attach SharePoint, archiving, CRM, and to optimize your suite of other upsell opportunities. Onboarding. Significantly reduce the time to profit from your acquisition costs by automating onboarding and migration to Office 365. Generating leads and making sales If you are a potential CSP partner today, then you may have existing customers that you can migrate to a new Office 365 solution. But long-term revenue viability is ultimately reliant on your ability to bring in new customers, convince them of the Office 365 value proposition, and attach services to the platform. Leads One of the most important factors in starting to build a run rate business is how to generate good customer leads. Hosting providers and CSPs that have been in the provider business long enough understand that a sales solution without good leads is an expensive and low-conversion process. Buying a generic data dump of thousands of stale leads is also not a viable solution. Customers today expect to have a conversation more tailored to their individual business rather than a generalist discussion. Deep insight into the lead s business and technology needs will result in a much more fruitful conversation. Good leads are essential to maintaining a robust pipeline, which is imperative for a CSP s sustainable profits. A good lead relies on a good lead generation process. Such a process should produce leads that identify potential customers who are in a growth or transition phase and who are positioned to migrate to a new system. The process should also identify essential messaging and messaging system attributes that would suggest high attachment revenue potential while minimizing acquisition cost. Leads might also be optimized according to other factors, such as market segment, location, etc. Generating these types of quality leads require a professional service with access to huge sources of expensive data. The service must also possess the expertise to analyze and process the data according to your unique needs as a CSP. To optimize your return on hiring a service, hire a professional service that understands your business needs and goals and those of your target customers.

Finally, find a leads service that has a flexible fee model that aligns with your onboarding sales model. Avoid lead services that charge a set fee for arbitrary leads. Great lead services will only charge fees for leads that result in closed sales. Sales Armed with a robust set of business and technology data about your lead, your sales team is well-positioned to convert leads into sales. A critical component of converting these leads is providing a highly-customized sales pitch to each lead. This pitch should include a range of business solutions that are optimized for the lead based on their business, financial, and technical profile. As you evaluate service providers for generating leads, be sure the solution includes a component that allows your sales force to create highly-customized sales pitches based on the lead profiles. Customized sales pitches are a critical requirement for converting leads. Upselling and attaching services to Office 365 Making a sale for Office 365, at a minimum, provides Exchange mailboxes, Microsoft Office, file storage, and Lync conferencing for your customers. There are two primary paths that increase the potential for profit. The first is to focus on driving down the acquisition cost by reducing the amount of time and expense it takes to onboard this customer. Reducing acquisition cost is discussed in the next section. The second way to increase revenue is to use Office 365 as the attachment platform for upselling additional services. To optimize the upsell potential, you must learn more about your customer s business goals and their IT infrastructure. In the same way that a deep understanding of leads can convert to sales, a deeper understanding of your customers business and current technical infrastructure will convert to upsell profits. After you have secured the customer, your sales team should engage with the customer to get a deep understanding of their business needs. Just as important: your technical team must learn about the customer s IT infrastructure in order to evaluate the integration and upsell opportunities for both Office 365 services and any other services that your CSP provides. Together, the sales team can work with the technical team to identify and realize upsell opportunities. While the following section will discuss reducing acquisition costs in greater detail, it s worth noting here that the upsell and attachment phase of the onboarding process can be automated to help drive down the acquisition costs associated with the upsell investment incurred by the investigative phase. Generating a deep understanding of customer business needs is still most effectively accomplished the old-fashioned way: by sales professionals meeting and discussing business goals with the customer. But for the IT infrastructure investigation and evaluation component of the upsell opportunity, you can save a lot of time and expense by automating the IT evaluation process. With access to the customer s IT

infrastructure, your technical sales team should run automated tools to verify system health, bandwidth, performance, software titles and end of life support, configuration, topology, permissions, and all of the technical data that is required to make sound onboarding decisions as well as high-value upsell recommendations. Good automation health-checking tools should analyze the organization for both the onboarding scenario (technical workflow), while also highlighting optimal integration, attachment, and upsell opportunities. Onboarding As a Microsoft CSP that will be offering Office 365, there a number of decisions that your organization will need to make regarding the overall user experience for onboarding and support. For example, how will your customers manage their Office 365 tenant organization? How will you onboard new customers? What is the right way for you to migrate your existing customers to the new platform? How much automation should you invest in for these tasks? All of these decisions require thoughtful planning and must take into account not only profitability, but the user experience, the size of your organization, the number of domains and mailboxes that you host today (if any), and the timeline you are working against. This section of the document lays out a planning strategy and explains the trade-offs, dependencies, cost inputs, and other relevant components associated with onboarding your existing customers and new customers onto the Office 365 platform. Reducing the cost of acquisition The cost of acquiring new customers for Office 365 can be significant. While there are some marginal upfront costs associated with converting leads to sales, the substantial cost of acquisition is spent on onboarding users to the Office 365 platform. The higher the cost of acquisition is for each user, the longer your organization will have to support users before realizing a profit. Therefore, it is critical to focus your strategic planning efforts on driving down the cost and time associated with onboarding customers. To that end, this section will discuss four principles that should frame your planning efforts for onboarding. Forget Greenfield: All customers are migrating from other solutions As you plan how you will onboard your customers to Office 365, you must recognize that the vast majority of them are, at a minimum, already using a messaging solution. More likely, your customers will also be running document management solutions, contact management or directory integration, and a host of other technologies. And while some customers may not be concerned with maintaining investments in specific technologies, migrating the data associated with these technologies to Office 365 is likely to be a critical priority for them.

Therefore, as a CSP, you must approach the onboarding space and the costs associated with it as a migration project. Since only the tiniest relative percentage of your users will be on-boarded without existing data, do not estimate costs as a Greenfield exercise. Instead, build an onboarding plan with a cost model that assumes all of the various tasks required not just for provisioning and configuring new customers, but also for migrating their existing data into the Office 365 solution. Build a viable plan: Account for the each of the onboarding tasks While some customers may have existing solutions and requirements that require specialized onboarding planning, most customers that move to Office 365 can be migrated using the following seven broad tasks:

Reducing the cost of acquisition for a given customer relies on reducing the cost and time associated with each of these tasks. Office 365 subscription and domain provisioning Subscribing to the Office 365 service and provisioning a domain are the first tasks associated with onboarding a new customer to Office 365. These tasks require a one-time per organization commitment. While not relatively expensive to other onboarding tasks, there is work associated with this step. Generally, an experienced IT professional takes between 30-60 minutes to step through the online provisioning process for Office 365. Site discovery and preparation A thorough and accurate understanding of your customer s existing environment is essential to a successful migration to Office 365. This is especially true if you are migrating your customer s messaging data to the new platform. You must reliably extract DNS configuration, mail routing and provider information according to the requirements of the toolsets you are using for onboarding. Ideally, a single tool would collect this information and prepare it for Office 365-specific migration workflow. Other components that may require discovery are contact or directory information, calendaring solutions, document management or archive solutions. In addition to discovery, the site preparation phase should include an end-user communication plan. Users must understand when they are switching over to Office 365, what they must do to prepare for the move, and finally, what tasks are expected of them to ensure a successful migration. Communication plans must be well-planned. The phases of communication should be tightly-coupled to onboarding and migration milestones in the engineering plan.

Office 365 user account provisioning and license assignment Each user in your customer s organization must be provisioned in Office 365. Additionally, after a given user is created, you must assign them a specific license before they can access the service. The cost and time associated with this task is directly related to the number of users that your customer is onboarding to Office 365. There are a number of ways to automate these tasks and reduce the engineering costs associated with them. Generally, the most expensive approach is the manual one, where a helpdesk employee steps through the Office 365 web tool and creates each user, and then assigns a license. This is expensive and obviously does not scale well. A slightly less impoverished approach is to generate a CSV file of user data and upload that list through the online toolset provided by Office 365. Ideally, a single toolset extracts relevant user data from an existing source environment and provisions new users automatically. Mailbox data migration Perhaps the biggest variable that impacts cost of acquisition is the cost associated with migrating customer messaging data. For most customers, the expectation for high-fidelity preservation of messaging data is high. In addition to essential mail data, customers expect all of the associated Outlook experience to move as well: contacts, journaling, calendaring, notes, tasks, rules, folder permissions and even Outlook client settings such as autocomplete functionality, personal archives, and signatures. The first challenge to building an onboarding plan in the context of messaging migration is determining which messaging solutions you can support. While there are less than a dozen or so established email providers that may warrant migration support, each provider will have a different set of technical requirements, and none are motivated to help you move their customers away from their platform. From a cost-prediction perspective, the messaging migration phase of the onboarding workflow is highly volatile, with the potential to dramatically drive up the cost of acquisition.

As such, building a supportable migration model to support all providers is a hard but essential problem to solve. A successful model must conform to the rest of your onboarding process in such a way that does not result in a workflow that is full of expensive, out-of-band exceptions and site visits. Ideally, the mailbox data migration phase of your onboarding workflow minimizes onsite configuration, uses the same toolset across all source messaging solutions, and integrates seamlessly with the other phases of your onboarding workflow. You must be able to migrate the most popular provider sources to Office 365. In order of volume to Office 365, the most popular providers are: Exchange on-premise Exchange Hosted IMAP Google Apps Lotus Notes Zimbra GroupWise DNS configuration The DNS configuration of the onboarding process is the phase where you switch the customer infrastructure over to Office 365. And while not a particularly expensive operation in itself, the DNS configuration phase is a significant milestone in that it requires the coordination of multiple onboarding tasks. The technical work of messaging migration must be completed in synchronization with appropriate end-user communications. Client software configuration must not kick off until DNS configuration and messaging flow is verified. And finally, messages that have been sent in the period between mail migration and the time the DNS has been configured must be reliably copied and synchronized into the new Office 365 platform. A successful workflow for the DNS configuration step can be tricky. The workflow must reconcile, coordinate, and execute each of these interdependent steps reliably, while allowing a reasonable rollback option in the case of an error.

Software configuration (Outlook) Many of your customers that move to Office 365 will be running Outlook on the desktop. In fact, for most of these new users, their first interaction with Office 365 will be through an Outlook experience. The easier the Outlook configuration process is for these users, the more successful you will be at reducing your cost of acquisition. The ideal new user experience minimizes user interaction with the installation and configuration to a few clicks through a highly-prescriptive wizard-driven experience. A solution that requires any onsite visits to configure Outlook is expensive and does not scale well. Advanced migration scenarios When it comes to the migration portion of onboarding, you must have a solution for moving content beyond just messaging data. Your customers will have production data across their IT infrastructure, and this data will be business-critical for their operations: documents, personal archives and PSTs, enterprise archives, public folders, etc. You will encounter customers that must have data migrated from number of different solutions, including Exchange, SharePoint, GoogleApps, Semantic, DropBox, FileServer, Box, OneDrive, EMC, HP, and others. Using a robust onboarding solution that seamlessly migrates these data types and their associated permissions to Office 365 represents a huge upsell opportunity for your business. In fact, moving your customer s messaging data should be seen as just the primary attachment vehicle for sustaining high yield profitability for your organization. Sustained profitability will come from your ability to onboard customers into the more profitable Office 365 licensing solutions such as CRM, SharePoint, Office Professional Plus, etc. To maximize profits: offer a fully-integrated business data solution through Office 365 that includes seamless onboarding all of the production data that your customers care about. Minimize manual onboarding tasks: Automation is essential to quicker profit By reviewing the seven tasks above, it should be obvious that the more you can automate the essential tasks of onboarding customers to Office 365, the more you are likely to reduce the cost of acquisition. That said, there may be significant cost associated with developing the automation tasks in-house, especially given the high number of variable source platforms and technologies that you will need to onboard into Office 365.

A tempting alternative to building your own solution is using the free tools from Microsoft. And while for some customers, these tools may suffice as one-off solutions, the free migration tools offered by Microsoft are generally designed for highly prescribed scenarios with fairly restrictive sets of supported dependencies and requirements. Their supported solutions for non-microsoft products are rudimentary at best. In most scenarios, Microsoft free tools require onsite resourcing to install server software, perform additional server configurations, and install costly certificates. Understanding the cost of running Microsoft free migration tools is critical as you plan your automated onboarding solution. Some of the hidden costs of running Microsoft free tools are discussed here. All of the free tools offered by Microsoft that migrate Exchange organizations to Office 365 (cutover tool, staged migration tool, hybrid deployment, and public folder tools) require that you install, configure, and enable Outlook Anywhere in your customer s Exchange organization. Outlook Anywhere, also referred to as RPC over HTTP, requires an expensive SSL certificate from a commercial certificate authority (CA). You may need to upgrade your customer s Exchange server before migrating with free tools. For example, you cannot run the staged Exchange migration tool on Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2013. Support for Microsoft free tools starts with user forums. Working directly with a knowledgeable support expert is the best way to insure success when you hit an unexpected critical issue during migration. Microsoft free tools use a cut-over migration model, where mail is removed from the on-premises mailbox and moved into the on-premises mailbox. Such a model significantly increases the impact of failures or any other issue that increases the time until the MX record can be pointed toward Office 365. To minimize the potential for downtime and data loss, we recommend using a solution that uses a copy model. In a copy model, all mailbox data (including emails, calendars, tasks, contacts, notes, journals, rules, and permissions) is copied not moved from the source and then pre-filled into the Office 365 destination organization. The Microsoft staged Exchange migration tool uses RPC/HTTP to copy mailbox data to Office 365. The RPC/HTTP protocol is optimized for single client access to Exchange, not for high-throughput server performance. In fact, for best performance, Microsoft recommends using the Exchange Web Service (EWS) protocol for migrating data to Office 365. The staged migration tool moves mailboxes only; it does not move recipient types such as contacts, mail-enabled users, or distribution groups. To move those types of recipients, you must install and run DirSync on-premises. The IMAP Migration tool is the only free tool offered by Microsoft that allows you to migrate from non-microsoft solutions. Since IMAP, by design, only holds mail items, Microsoft s doesn t have a free tool to support migrating other messaging related data (documents, calendars, contacts, tasks, etc.) from foreign systems.

Migrating public folders with the free tools supplied by Microsoft requires careful, detailed planning and a complex set of multi-step procedures to complete. Clearly, for CSPs investing in a long-term partnership to maximize cloud profit, deploying a third-party migration service with expertise in Office 365 migrations from all relevant data sources is a best practice. A good third-party migration service centralizes migration to Office 365 at the core of their business. By keeping pace with source, migration, and Microsoft cloud technologies, a good third-party migration business continually innovates and improves the end-to-end automated onboarding experience for CSPs and endusers. Drive a reliable cost model: Develop a solution that results in a fixed, per-user cost Finally, as you calculate costs for different onboarding workflow solutions, use a per-user cost accounting model. Given the per-user licensing model of Office 365 and the subsequent per-user subscription model that CSPs use to structure fees, it makes sense to determine onboarding costs by the same metric. When you calculate the cost of developing an automated onboarding solution, amortizing that cost should be expressed as the cost of onboarding each user. Figuring out this per-user onboarding cost is critical for calculating your profit potential and the break-even threshold for developing an automated onboarding solution. Determining the per-user onboarding cost is a challenging exercise. But it highlights the value of using a thirdparty to provide the expertise required for seamless and performant onboarding solutions. The cost of rolling your own robust, automated end-to-end onboarding solution is not likely to pencil out. Getting a software team to take on the daunting challenge of onboarding from any source to Office 365 is cost- and timeprohibitive. And if you already have a development team, adding a migration component to that effort will add significant cost to your existing team. Ongoing development will be required as source environments evolve and the inevitable feature-adds and bug fixes are made to the solution. So the cost is not a fixed, onetime cost. And though development team resourcing is certainly the highest cost in building an automated solution, there are many other costs associated with developing a highly-specialized migration solution, such as management, insurance, computer hardware, enabling cloud technology licensing, etc. After you have determined the baseline per-user onboarding cost, look at third-party onboarding solutions to compare costs with rolling your own. A good third-party onboarding solution will provide a straightforward, per-user licensing fee. Data fees should be similarly expressed in simple per-gb values. Support options Migrating and onboarding to Office 365 can be a challenging task for any organization. Many small businesses do not have a professional IT engineering staff. And as an organization grows into a medium or large business, their messaging and data needs also grow and are often complicated by a number of businessrelated factors, such as regulation or mergers and acquisitions. As a CSP, you ll need to evaluate what your role should be in helping your existing and new customers onboard to Office 365.

An important variable that will impact how you support onboarding is the type of organizations that you may already host or that you are targeting as customers. If you are a CSP that supports businesses of all sizes, then your approach to supporting migrations will likely be much more dynamic than a CSP that serves a specific vertical segment, such as small business accounting firms. The purpose of this section is to explain the three types of onboarding support options you will need to evaluate as you plan your overall user experience onboarding strategy: self-service, professional services, or a hybrid approach. How you implement an onboarding support strategy is in large part defined by your customer base and their threshold for managing IT tasks associated with onboarding. Remember: Greenfield onboarding scenarios are rare. So from a strategic perspective, you should plan for onboarding scenarios that include a necessary component of data migration. In this section, the term onboarding is used to refer to this broad set of tasks that includes messaging, archive, documents, public folders, and other data migration. Be sure your sales and marketing teams are involved with the onboarding support decision. Sales and marketing will understand your customers needs. The will also advocate for reasonable thresholds of onboarding tasks that engineering and operations may not appreciate from the inside. Further, sales and marketing will probably need to convince some customers that the onboarding tasks are worth the value proposition that Office 365 provides, so having insight into the options and trade-offs will help your externalfacing employees make a more informed case for your business. Self-service The term self-service implies a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach where customers are on their own and hacking together solutions to get their data migrated to a new platform. Such an impoverished vision of self-service is not the experience we re referring to and is certainly not a good business practice. While it may be tempting to push the migration project entirely to your customers as a cost-savings approach, customers that attempt and then botch a migration will be contacting your organization first to clean up their mess. And their end users will associate the bad user experience of a failed migration with the new environment. Inevitably, the DIY approach will result in a significantly lower activation rates and much higher support costs after the sale. Minimal self-service model Rather, in the context of CSP hosting services, a self-service onboard scenario would be highly prescribed, well-tested procedure that has been vetted, optimized, and well-documented by the CSP. At a minimum, customers working through a self-service migration would step through a set of customized documentation and would be interacting with the source and destination systems through existing hosted control panel and Office 365 portal. While the benefit of this minimal solution might be attractive in its seemingly lower, up-front development costs, its success relies in large part on the abilities of your customers to work through your documentation

to migrate and onboard from a variety of source systems. Documenting and testing each of these workflows is expensive. And if you overestimate the technical abilities of your customers or their willingness or ability to follow your documentation then you risk spending a lot more money on support. Worse yet, you may end up losing dissatisfied customers altogether. Robust self-service model Instead, strive for a more robust self-service scenario. For a robust self-service model, use a third-party onboarding and migration service to do the heavy engineering work associated with onboarding. Define a migration and onboarding workflow and integrate your existing control panel with third-party tools, Office 365 portal or APIs. Good third-party migration and onboarding solutions should support multiple source systems integrate all relevant source data types (messaging, archive, public folders, documents) into the migration platform specialize in performant onboarding and migration to Office 365 allow you to customize white-label customer-facing portals provide a consistent and predictable workflow for all scenarios, regardless of source system support full migration and onboarding without any site visits or on-site software installations include automated Outlook distribution and configuration charge a fixed, per-user rate Paired with such a solution, then the upfront cost of a robust self-service migration support strategy is nominal, and long-term support costs are drastically reduced. Professional service A professional service approach to migration support is when the CSP takes ownership of migrating and onboarding their tenants to the new platform. In this model, the CSP defines the end-to-end workflow as an internal process that relies minimally on customer interaction. You should use third-party migration and onboarding solutions to enable your professional services. Doing so will further drive down long-term development and support costs associated with onboarding multiple source systems to Office 365. In the context of professional services, a good third-party tool will include the features listed in the previous section and should also include a highly configurable platform for out-of-band and customized solutions. The third-party migration and onboarding solution should integrate all

components of the full CSP onboarding lifecycle: from generating leads to the client logon to monthly reporting after the onboarding is complete. The benefits of the professional services model are many. First of all, you will absolutely control the global migration process and the customer experience. Since you are exposing little to no migration workflow to your customers, you are able to focus your development, support, and operations resourcing on a solid onboarding plan and the automation efficiencies that are available through professional toolsets. While you may use a third-party solution to assist in all stages of the onboarding planning and execution, from a customer perspective, the process ought to be regarded as a seamless experience that is provided as a professional service of the CSP. Clearly, there is also a benefit to a sales pitch that offers a zero-touch onboarding plan. Another benefit of adopting a professional service model is that you have an opportunity to build in-house expertise with the toolsets, technologies, and services associated with onboarding to Office 365. As a Microsoft CSP who offers the Office 365 solution, a large number of your future customers will be looking to migrate their on-premises Exchange organizations into Office 365. Your organization will be better positioned to profit from a variety of onboarding and migration solutions if you provide professional services. And perhaps one of the biggest benefits of using a professional service model, especially with your larger customers, is that this approach requires that you have your best technical sales people working directly with the decision-makers. This provides an ideal context for establishing a relationship with your customer that can lead to cross-sell and upsell opportunities. To optimize long-term profitability, the relationship you establish during onboarding can be extended into a monthly or quarterly health check report. Hybrid The onboarding support answer for many organizations will be a hybrid solution. There are many reasons a hybrid solution might make sense for your organization. The first is that you may have a large set of customers that can be supported with a self-service model and a handful that will require professional service. Alternatively, you may discover as you develop a professional service model that you can optimize a self-service model for a specific segment of your customer base. Some CSPs monetize professional services in the context of a suite of migration plans. So for example, you may provide a robust self-service model as a standard migration plan and then offer a professional service migration plan as an upgrade. As you make an onboarding support decision, you must look at the complexity of your hosting environment, the costs associated with developing and supporting the various workflows, and the long-term implications of developing migration expertise and toolsets. But in all cases, the same essential user experience criterion coupled with enabling opportunities for upsell and cross-sell potential should drive how you develop a support model.

Migrating your existing customers from legacy hosted Exchange to Office 365 If your organization is moving off of an Exchange hosted platform onto a CSP Office 365 solution, then you must define an onboarding strategy to move your current tenants onto the new platform. The business case for your strategy should recognize the revenue opportunities associated with attaching services to the new platform. From an operational perspective, your internal migration strategy should use a common set of workflow automation to onboard all customers. In other words, you shouldn t build an entirely different toolset to onboard customers just because they are migrating from your existing infrastructure. Off-boarding strategies How you structure and position your off-boarding strategy is a critical component of your plan. In this context, off-boarding refers to how you move your existing hosted Exchange customers onto the Office 365 platform. As with other decisions, the right off-boarding strategy for your organization must balance the needs of your customers with your business requirements and engineering resourcing. If your business case requires that you migrate your current customers onto the Office 365 platform, then you ll need to create an off-boarding strategy. There are three broad strategies for off-boarding tenant organizations: Forced migration Optional Hybrid Each of these strategies is discussed in more detail below. Forced Migration In the forced migration off-boarding scenario, your organization sets the timeline for moving all existing hosted Exchange customers to Office 365. Your sales or marketing team communicates the timeline to your customers and works with your engineering team to set a specific migration date for each customer. Your overall timeline dictates an end-of-life date for the existing infrastructure. The benefit of a forced migration model is that the end-of-life date provides an organizing principle and wellunderstood schedule for managing the migration project. Support, engineering, and marketing teams can work together to optimize customer messaging, support and operations resourcing, and infrastructure load balancing to maximize the potential for a smooth migration for all of your customers. From an operations and engineering perspective, a forced migration is the most supportable scenario. The main reason for this is that by carefully scheduling migrations, you will be able to control how and when large, or otherwise complex tenants migrate to Office 365. By controlling the pace and volume of migrations,

with good planning, your team can be assured that load restrictions, bandwidth, or other infrastructure bottlenecks are accounted for in order to ensure a successful project. A forced migration may sound heavy-handed from a customer perspective, but a properly empowered sales team that is working with engineering and support can use the forced migration as a method for providing customized migration service. In fact, by working with engineering and support to schedule a migration, the sales team can provide critically important reassurance in the migration experience for some high-touch customers. This context also enables excellent opportunities for your sales team to upsell and cross-sell at a critical milestone in the customer relationship. Optional In the optional off-boarding scenario, your organization still sets a timeline for moving all existing hosted Exchange customers to Office 365. But unlike the forced migration scenario, where customer migrations are scheduled, in the optional off-boarding scenario, you give the customers a window of time (say, six months) to migrate their tenant organization to the Office 365 solution. The optional off-boarding scenario has the obvious benefit of providing your customers with a more flexible timeframe in which to prepare their organization for migration to Office 365. As a result, this scenario relieves some pressure on the sales team in terms of messaging, but may increase the planning and resourcing costs for your support and engineering teams. These teams, involved directly with designing, maintaining, and supporting the migration infrastructure will need to plan for a more dynamic migration load potential than they otherwise would in a forced migration. Engineering and support must design a migration plan to account for throughput and performance based on maximum projected modeling. This modeling starts by understanding your infrastructure throughput and comparing it to the demand generated by migrating data to Office 365. By evaluating your customer profile, you can begin to estimate basic load requirements on your infrastructure for a typical migration. If you are hosting many large (10,000 + mailboxes) organizations, then you ll need to make sure that your infrastructure can handle simultaneous migrations by these organizations. Hybrid The hybrid off-boarding scenario is another approach for migrating legacy hosted Exchange organizations to Office 365. In this model, some tenant organizations are scheduled with a forced migration, while others are given a window of time in which to migrate. This model works well for CSP organizations that host many different types and sizes of organizations. For example, consider a CSP that hosts a handful of large tenants with thousands of mailboxes and hundreds of small tenants with less than 250 mailboxes. In this scenario, it may make sense to schedule forced migrations for the smaller organizations, while providing an optional off-boarding timeframe for the larger tenants.

Planning for a hybrid strategy is more complex in a number of ways. For sales, the messaging bifurcates along customer lines, which can be tricky in some situations. Operation teams must also design, support, and maintain an infrastructure that can handle the variable load of open-ended migration events, while accounting for major forced migrations of other customers. For these reasons, often a hybrid approach is executed in the framework of an optional strategy when a handful of large or complex tenants must be shepherded through the migration. BitTitan onboarding and migration solutions As a born-in-the-cloud business, BitTitan understands the challenges of moving to the cloud. We understand that CSPs require a predictable, repeatable solution that allows them to be profitable on cloud migration projects. Our comprehensive solution for migrating to Office 365 allows CSPs to scale up their business while spending less time with the actual technical tasks associated with migrating data. No other migration solution offers more complete end-to-end support for profitable CSP business than BitTitan provides. Our best-inclass migration platform, MigrationWiz, aligns with a predictable and prescriptive migration methodology and with our sales tools. To help you maximize profitability, we attend and host educational tech events where we teach you how using BitTitan solutions and methodology will enable you to execute successful migrations to Office 365. Our frequent cloud readiness road shows coupled with our extensive Advisor Services contribute to ensuring your successful and profitable Office 365 migration projects. The following sections describe the core technical components of the complete BitTitan migration solution. When coupled with our proven sales and migration methodologies, these components provide an end-to-end onboarding solution for a profitable CSP business. BitTitan Insights: Best-in-class CSP leads Our lead generation and sales automation solution is the most innovative solution in the industry. No other competitors provide better leads and sales tools to partners than BitTitan. By using our leads and sales automation tools, you will be able to provide optimal solutions for companies that need to migrate to the cloud. We've built intellectual property to scan the internet and identify what potential customers are using for a messaging solution. We run this scan monthly to watch for messaging migrations. When we identify a company that has migrated, we then overlay multiple additional data sources about that company into our leads solution and pipe that data into Azure machine learning. With thousands of such migrations, our data scientists have built a dynamic neural network to generate predictive analytics that identifies for each relevant organization in the world the percentage of likelihood that a given company will migrate to Office 365. The result of this analysis provides a stack ranked list of leads, which we then give to you. The leads are free as long as you use MigrationWiz for companies that you migrate and were generated with the lead we provide.

BitTitan Sales Automation: Generates profitable pitch scenarios To help you convert leads to robust full Office 365 suite sales opportunities, we provide an automated sales tool that is run in the customer environment. The sales automation tool consumes technical infrastructure data and combines it with our lead analytics data and other relevant information such as business segment and location to dynamically generate the exact message that you need to pitch to the customer in order to attach services and upsell Office 365. BitTitan UserActivation for CSP: Premier self-service Office 365 onboarding solution for SMBs BitTitan has released a product specifically to help CSP partners automate the entire onboarding process for SMBs moving to Office 365. UserActivation for CSP provides an end-to-end solution for onboarding customers to Office 365 at scale. UserActivation for CSP automates the following steps: 1. User, distribution list, and alias discovery off of source environment. 2. User, and distribution list, and alias creation in Office 365. 3. Domain and Office 365 license assignment. 4. Mailbox migration. 5. Make all DNS changes on customer s behalf. 6. Automated Outlook configuration. Run UserActivation if: You are migrating to Office 365 Your source solution is Exchange 2003+, Zimbra, Google Apps, Novell Groupwise, or IMAP You are doing a big bang migration (UserActivation for CSP does not support a staged migration approach) You want to offer a fully-automated migration for your customers When it comes to SMB messaging migration projects, there may be a temptation to use manual processes or free tools in an effort to save money. But if your business relies on performing these types of migrations on a regular basis, then the majority of your costs are going toward technical engineering to support the multiple manual steps associated with migration and client configuration. We have designed UserActivation for CSP to automate many of the repetitive and tedious manual tasks associated with setting up the Office 365 tenant, migrating mailboxes, and configuring Outlook for SMB migrations to Office 365. Automating these tasks significantly reduces the amount of time that your engineers are spending on each project, thereby allowing you to maximize profit or to provide more competitive pricing for your services. Once you have gathered the necessary information from the customer, UserActivation for CSP allows you to enter that information into our two-step process. UserActivation for CSP will automate all remaining steps of the process for you. Each project can now take only minutes of manual time verses hours.

BitTitan has designed, built, and maintained ownership of the entire UserActivation IP stack. We do not rely on third-party tools, services, or dependencies. Coupled with the scheduling features in UserActivation for CSP, this level of control lets you determine the exact timeline for your migration. Other migration solutions require you to submit your project and wait up to five days before migration begins. But UserActivation for CSP begins migration when you click Submit. And with 24/7 live support, BitTitan is quick to work with you to answer any questions during each project. Simply put, UserActivation for CSP is the ideal solution for providing a fully automated Office 365 onboarding solution for your SMB customers. BitTitan MigrationWiz: Industry leading onboarding platform MigrationWiz is our flagship product. It s the leading cloud-based data migration service, enabling companies around the globe to easily migrate mailboxes and data to other systems and platforms. BitTitan has been developing cloud migration expertise since we were the premier migration solution for Microsoft BPOS. We understand the scale, performance, complexities, and proprietary software challenges that must be met for seamless migration and data integration into the cloud. MigrationWiz takes the heavy lifting out of complex technical challenges involved with migrating data between systems. Our engineers are obsessed with preserving data fidelity, automating expensive processes, securing critical production payload, and optimizing performance and scale. Our partners love it. MigrationWiz has migrated more than 2.5 million users to the cloud in more than 150 countries. Because we view messaging data as the cornerstone to a profitable CSP business and customer relationship, MigrationWiz makes messaging migrations and messaging data integration easy, fast, and predictable. But to grow a profitable CSP business, you must be excellent at providing solutions that migrate any data on any platform to the cloud. That s why in addition to migrating traditional mailbox data such as email, calendars, contacts, tasks, and journals, MigrationWiz also migrates enterprise archive solutions, PSTs, public folders, documents, and other data types. We partner with Microsoft to provide incentives to our CSP partners that enable you to offer best-in-class productivity solutions to your customers. With MigrationWiz, you will be confident that the production data that your customers care about will be migrated and integrated into Office 365. You don t need an army of engineers to run MigrationWiz: it s managed and configured from your web browser. All migration processing occurs in the cloud in one of five secure, highly performant MigrationWiz distributed datacenters. We ve built the platform to minimize on-site configurations and software installation.

MigrationWiz ticks all of the important boxes that a CSP requires to be profitable: CSP platform: MigrationWiz is a complete migration solution. Our aim is to migrate any data from on-premises solutions into the cloud. Specifically, we optimize for migrating production data into the Office 365 cloud so your customers can realize the productivity gains the full Office 365 suite can enable, and so you can build a profitable business. If you are a CSP, then you are our primary customer. Our business relies on your business being more profitable. Migrates messaging: for all but the most bounded scenarios that may be supported by Microsoft free tools, messaging migration to Office 365 is more performant, more reliable, cheaper, and much easier on MigrationWiz. Want more detail on that? Take a look at our whitepaper about the true cost of free tools. Migrates content: Your customers have important production content that they rely upon to run their businesses. If your customers go to the cloud, they will want assurance that their important data goes with them and that it s integrated into an environment that enables robust business productivity. You can bid with confidence. Customers may be storing content in Google Drive, Google Vault, generic file shares, Dropbox, Exchange public folders, SharePoint, a third-party content management solution, or any number of other solutions. MigrationWiz will migrate them to Office 365. Our platform provides automation that helps you filter through the content your customers want to purge or to bifurcate into a different long-term storage solution. Whenever possible, MigrationWiz will preserve permissions and other critical metadata to ensure that the data integration into OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, Azure, etc. is productive for your customers, and profitable for your business. Migrates enterprise and personal archives: Enterprise messaging archive solutions are often a blocker for messaging migration. That s why we ve recently updated the MigrationWiz platform to support migration of enterprise archive solutions, such as Symantec Enterprise Vault, EMC, and others into Exchange and the Office 365 cloud. MigrationWiz will move enterprise archive data 5-10x faster than other solutions, and it will preserve the chain of custody for all data. And if your customers are allowing their users to manage their own archiving with PST files, MigrationWiz provides an end-to-end automated solution that allows you to discover and migrate PSTs. Supports advanced scenarios: In the case where customers have unique data migration needs, BitTitan works with our partners to extend MigrationWiz s platform to solve problems. In fact, a number of our advanced features are the result of working with partners to resolve complex migration problems. For examples, read about three advanced features in this blog post.