Effective migration is a team effort and involves multiple parties. Making the decision to migrate to a new platform must start with determining the technological and strategic objectives, detecting the failures to be solved, and determining future goals. All parties must work together on the strategy. Regardless of your business goals, your migration project cannot simply involve management instructing the IT team to implement a new platform that replaces the old one.

Key players within the management team and the involved leaders must actively participate in the creation of the migration plan. It is important to schedule time throughout the process to discuss which existing features the company wants to keep, and what data they want to keep traceability for. Sitting down and prioritizing goals and tasks will reduce oversights, ensuring the new platform meets expectations and effectively serves business goals.

Acquiring new technology for the entire organization will never be an easy or quick decision. The success or failure of your collaborative work for at least the next 2 or 3 years will depend good analysis.

To choose a suitable tool, you should think through the following factors:

• Consider your specific needs, features you are looking for in the tool, work methodology of your teams, and expected functionalities.
• Find the best solution on the market. The industry is full of both short and long-range solutions, so it is vital to perform a planning exercise with stakeholders that enables you to select the appropriate technology.
• Compare the platforms on the market in terms of video and audio features, collaboration and interaction tools, and the engagement that can be achieved with these in your work teams.
• Find a tool that provides the greatest possible integration between the different departments, to improve communication.
• Provide integration with other business applications, thus giving employees the tools they need to perform their activities, which in turn results in greater productivity.

The task of migrating from one platform to another requires control over all users’ calendar, recurrent meetings, and the current platform’s internal calendar; only then can a migration begin, in a completely manual way.

This is why it is important to count on an experienced provider and an advanced migration system that enables automating tasks that are usually manual and enables the migration process to be completed in less time. However, migration is not the only important thing to consider; granularity must be guaranteed in the information that is being migrated, and enriched data that facilitate decision-making. Migrating from one system to the other is not enough; in the process many records and users may see erroneous configurations or lose data along the process. The tool you choose should guarantee a smooth process and give you visibility both of what you migrated and what needs to be remediated. In this way, you will guarantee the adoption of the new technology in less time, and ensure that you are taking full advantage of its functionalities.

Determining how you will move your meetings, channels, participants, and recordings to the new platform is a common challenge that could generate data loss. Migration without analyzing the requirements and necessary configurations could have severe consequences for your business. 

Ensure you develop a concrete plan before beginning your meetings migration. Pay close attention when mapping what you want to migrate from one platform to another to ensure the visibility you need, and use appropriate tools, data validation, and a change management plan to maintain continuity.

Though the initial investment in testing and quality assurance may seem high, the cost of low productivity and collaboration can be much higher. If you establish a ROI-focused migration strategy, you will be able to complete the process in less time than you think, and you will recover the investment in a shorter time, while increasing productivity and engaging your staff.

A common fear with any platform migration is not maintaining your day-to-day operations during the process. Losing a day or causing operations interruptions can be disruptive and costly. Before a bulk migration, you need to ensure your migration tool is working correctly. You must have a plan in place in the event things don’t go as planned. You need to map out contingency, remediation, and continuity plans for each phase to address issues before they happen. A proactive approach will reduce or prevent interruptions.

Likewise, you must ensure that the migration will have the expected impact and have a plan that enables you to maintain the strategy over time, monitor the adoption of new technology, remedy non-migrated users, and perform awareness activities that will increase engagement of your staff.