Example project plan¶

This guide makes some assumptions to play through a fictional project. Since any time estimation will not be realistic as mentioned, they are left out here. Instead, the focus is on the tasks that have to be done to prepare and perform the migration.

Assumptions¶

Let’s assume the organization is with around 500 to 2 000 employees. At the moment, a M365 E5 license is in place and MS Teams is in use. Some departments also use Sharepoints to manage their files. As everything was moved into the cloud, there’s currently no own data center with servers available inhouse.

As Microsoft prices rise and the field that is being worked in might be a target for political discussions, the IT department got the task to look for ways to reduce dependencies on United States (of America) (U.S.) products and increase resilience. They found Nextcloud as a replacement and want to pitch that to the management.

Decision making¶

As stated in the section about Change Management it is very important that the upper management clearly com- municates the plan to move to Nextcloud. Therefore, we need to make sure that there is a clear strategic decision from them to move on. Before presenting Nextcloud as solution, we need to make sure to check the following things.

• A good vision that Nextcloud can replicate M365 features. There is no need to present every detail, but it must be clear that Nextcloud is a good replacement and no important features are missing.
• A price indication. Since it is not yet completely clear which modules will need an indication should be sufficient.
• A plan how to run Nextcloud, since the Nextcloud GmbH just sells the software licenses.
• A vision how the introduction could look like (which is outlined in this chapter).
• Contact Nextcloud GmbH for demos and answers to questions.

Since organizations only get the license for the software from Nextcloud GmbH, there are multiple ways of running the solution:

Since one goal is to increase resilience, we will not opt for an SaaS offering but for a private cloud option. We will not buy hardware but we want to stay in full control over our data. The PaaS provider can be chosen freely. You should also be in touch with the Nextcloud GmbH to get demos and get answers to questions answered upfront. This phase is already rather a marathon than a sprint, but we assume we got the decision to make the move to Nextcloud. Now we need to make sure that this is communicated through the whole organization. To prepare the communication, it should

• Talk to important stakeholders, if they weren’t a part of the decision-making process yet.
• Prepare a project plan including an order of migration.
• Prepare a good introduction of what is going to happen when and what is needed for that.
• Make sure to have feedback channels open early. There will be people who just want to complain, but others might have valuable input. Always make sure that try to understand the problem behind a complaint.
• Get the Nextcloud license and with it technical onboarding support.
• Select a PaaS provider and install Nextcloud.
• Prepare a concept how the extra effort required for the migration can be put in from everyone without relying on overtime alone.

Especially the last point needs an approval from decision makers because this usually means that other projects need to be postponed. Also take into account that not only the core project team needs time to implement the change, but everyone needs time for it.

Building the project team & finalizing the plan¶

Of course, the core project team already exists by now. But it will need a lot more people to really make it successful. That is also the reason to search for key users or internal ambassadors as described in the section about Change Management now. To onboard them, introduce what the project is about and why. Also, tell them about the plans have even if they are not complete yet. Besides that it should make sure that:

• there is a good communication channel between the core team and the key users. They must be able to ask questions quickly and uncomplicatedly. Emails are not recommended; group chats or a Microsoft Teams instance are (until the Talk instance is ready, of course).
• have a platform to share important updates and keep them visible. Emails are usually not suited for that.
• feedback is already gathered from the key users.

Regarding feedback on the timeline: A timeline is always too short for a migration in the user’s eyes, because they don’t have capacity for extra work naturally. That’s why need to think about how to free up time for them earlier. The goal for the feedback collection at this point is for organizational and technical feedback so it is known what challenges will face before the first steps. Also, it is about giving the key users the feeling that they are heard, which will make them more active in the following steps. Although the timeline is not a subject for discussion at this point, the order of steps/departments should be.

Admin & key user training¶

Before starting into the migration, we need to train our admins and our key users. At this moment we do not yet have the final usage concepts ready yet so the training can just be a basic one and must be accompanied by experiments and trying out. As a good ground to build on, we can use the official documentation which already gives usage instructions and a lot of administration documentation.

A very important part are experiments. Again, we do not know exactly how we will use Nextcloud until we went through the analyze and design phases. So we need to enable our key users to do some tests and try things out. Therefore, we need to do the following things:

• Set up a throw-away test system for the key users. This already lets the administrators become familiar with it.
• Do a basic training with the key users.
• Let the key users test things and support them with their experiments.
• Track the key users’ feedback and try to implement the improvements.

The actual migration¶

With the early feedback, we can also finalize the project plan. This needs to be communicated to and approved by the decision makers again. With the project plan finished, we can finally start the actual migrations. After the discussions with the key users, the following plan can be proposed.

1. Set up Nextcloud Files & Sendent MS Teams integration to replace Share- point as file storage backend (organization wide).
2. Set up the Sendent Exchange integration to sync calendars and address books between Microsoft and Nextcloud. This gives users the option to use Nextcloud, but they can also stay with their usual tools. The decision makers who initiated the project should already use the available Nextcloud features to lead by example.
3. Set up the Sendent Outlook integration.
4. Migrate the IT department’s Sharepoint sites which do not include Teams to Nextcloud.
5. Migrate all other Sharepoint sites without Teams to Nextcloud.
6. Migrate personal OneDrive storages.
7. Migrate the Intranet to Collectives, Contacts and Calendar.
8. Migrate Planner to Deck.
9. Migrate Teams.

We are starting with the IT’s Sharepoint sites because they contain only IT-internal information in our case. This way, the migration does not interfere with other projects where the IT needs to communicate with other departments and the ones who started the topic. All other Sharepoint sites which do just store data and do not interfere with inter-department communication follow to increase the amount of data stored in Nextcloud fairly fast without too much complexity.

If isolated Sharepoints are not present in the actual organization, can sync the files between Sharepoint and Nextcloud using MigrateDMS’ services. With Sharepoint, we already introduced team calendars, address books and we replaced a bunch of Lists with Tables.

After the first experiences with Nextcloud it is a good idea to continue with personal file storages. Here it is very important to follow the three steps mentioned in the project management section: Analyze, design, migrate. Although personal storages should not contain project data, they usually do because people will start to share files from there. Project files should be moved where they belong before the migration.

Additional apps like Calendar, Contacts and Mail can always be enabled for everyone since the data is not only stored in Nextcloud but either synced or completely stored in other systems. This means already using Nextcloud will not lead to any data loss or inconsistency. It is highly recommended that leaders and decision makers lead by example and start using Nextcloud already at this stage.

With all the files already migrated, there will be a demand to use more tools from Nextcloud since it can provide an integrated platform which will not be possible at this stage with Microsoft. So how we continue from here can be very flexible. If we see that users adopt well to the new environment, we can continue earlier as shown with MS Teams; if there are issues, however, we can leave that for the last step. Also, since only the documentation which we moved to Collectives contains structured and valuable information and not unstructured chat, we will not move the chats over to Talk. Although it’s possible, it reduces the time needed for the migration and also reduces possibilities for errors.

Background migrations¶

After moving the users to the new platform, we still need to do some background work, since Exchange and AD are still in place.

1. Make sure no one is using Outlook anymore and turn off the Sendent sync. The data is now only in Nextcloud for calendars and contacts.
2. Set up the new email server and migrate the mails.
3. Set up the new IdP and move the users.

For steps 2 and 3 we need to calculate with a downtime, but we do not need to train the users anymore—they are already using the Nextcloud Hub. From now on, our collaboration relies on sovereign open source software, where we are in control but without running our own data center.