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In this Podcast, Migrating Jive Content to Microsoft 365 Webinar from 2020, we discuss…

Min Topic
1:42 Number 1 – Why are people moving from Jive to Microsoft 365?
4:10 Number 2 – Tell me a little more about how workshops work.
8:15 Number 3 – What is the utility that we have for migrations?
12:01 Number 4 – What type of content do we migrate?
15:06 Number 5 – What type of content do we NOT migrate?
18:40 Number 6 – Tell me about archived content.
21:30 Number 7 – Tell me about the different phases of this project?
28:08 Number 8 – How much does it cost?
33:55 Number 9 – What are the biggest takeaways from these types of migrations?
40:10 Number 10 – How do factor in Yammer and Teams?

Transcript

Danny: It’s Friday, February 21st and today we have a webinar covering migrating from Jive to Microsoft 365 in 2020. I talk with Kirk Liemohn and Rob Horton from the transformation practice about the 10 things you should know about doing a Jive migration. I hope you enjoy. Hello and welcome to this webinar on migrating from Jive to Microsoft 365 and we’re covering 10 things that you should know about doing this migration.

 
I have some wonderful panelists here with me. This is actually a webinar that we ran three years ago, so we’re almost good. This is like an updated 10 things you need to know. And as part of that original webinar that we did, we had Kirk Liemohn there and Kirk, how are you doing?

 
Kirk Liemohn: I’m doing fine. Hello.

 
Danny: Awesome. Kirk is a technical lead for us in our transformation practice and then this time we have our transformation practice lead. You’re our leader here. Rob Horton. How are you doing Rob?

 
Rob Horton: I’m doing great. Thanks Danny.

 
Danny: Awesome. So today we’re going to go through 10 things that everyone should know about migrating from Jive to Microsoft 365. Before we get started here, you might have some of your own questions. I invite you to ask your questions to the go to webinar panel, and we’ll pick those up at the end to see if anybody has any questions as we go through. We’d love to hear from you. So to get us started here, are you ready? [inaudible 00:01:42]. First off, Rob, why are people moving from Jive to Microsoft 365?

 
Rob Horton: Well, we’ve worked with a lot of companies and it pretty much boils down to just a couple of things or big reasons why folks are moving off of Jive. One of the main reason is to just save costs. They’re looking at it as they’ve got a per user licensing. Most of these companies already have Microsoft 365 and they’re seeing that they’re also paying for a Jive license and it’s, they’ve got their content in two different places and they really want to consolidate those licensing fees and save some money. So that’s one of the main reasons I’d say a majority of our clients migrate off of Jive to Microsoft 365.

 
And also with a lot of our clients, they’re looking at it and that they have Microsoft 365 license already. And they’re realizing there’s a lot more to the Microsoft 365 can offer them beyond just content repository, beyond just SharePoint. They also are seeing that it offers Teams and Azure compute and exchange a lot of different things that they want to make sure that they’re really taking advantage of what their license already is providing them. They want to take advantage of what’s out there in addition to just content storage. So, this is probably the two biggest reasons why we’re seeing clients move.

 
Danny: It seems like, originally Jive was outpacing Microsoft’s three year product cycles and nowadays it seems like the reverse is happening where Microsoft is innovating faster and Jive, I think people, it just seems like it’s not getting all the updates that it used to and people are seeing Microsoft innovating faster. So that same people who wanted to bring Jive to the organization want to move over to Microsoft because they have the same reasons they want to stay innovative.

 
Kirk Liemohn: Jive’s not innovating at all anymore.

 
Danny: Next one up. Usually, and we’ve covered this with Tommy and I have talked about this, how most of our projects end up starting off with a workshop. Tell me a little bit more about what happens in one of those workshops.

 
Rob Horton: Sure. I can start out with this. I presented quite a few of these workshops. And first of all, it’s a great opportunity to really get to know your client and get to know what their vision is. Why are they migrating and what’s it going to look like when they get to Microsoft 365? And that’s exciting because although there’s some commonalities between our clients that each client’s unique and we really enjoy that part.

 
And that’s really the first part of the workshop is understanding their vision. Why they’re going to Microsoft 365 and what it’s going to look like when they get there? Then the other things that we talk about in that workshop, we really get into the current state of Jive. Is it in maintenance mode? Are they still innovating in Jive? Are they still adding places to Jive or, is it pretty stagnant? That sort of thing. What are their use cases for Jive?

 
And then we also look at their current state of SharePoint. Do they have a SharePoint presence either on-prem or online? Some clients they’re fully baked. They’ve got an entire intranet available to them and SharePoint online. They’re already there and we’re just bringing some content over form. And then other clients are brand new to SharePoint online. And so we want to get a feel for that because that helps determine, what kind of migration we do for them.

 
We get pretty technical with those as well, the current state. We want to know if they’re on-prem, Jive or if they’re in the cloud Jive. What kind of version they’re in. If they’ve got any customizations, if they’ve added anything on to Jive, that sort of thing. And we do the same on SharePoint. Are they predominantly an on-prem SharePoint, company or do they have a pretty good online presence? Are they just using SharePoint for content repository or do they have business applications built on top of it? Just to get a really pretty good understanding of where they are with SharePoint.

 
Danny: Awesome.

 
Rob Horton: Go ahead Kirk.

 
Kirk Liemohn: I mean, during that time, the client will be able to see some examples of content that’s going to be migrated. We’ll go over some of the corner cases that we necessarily wouldn’t have time to go over and in a format like this. And we’ll do it in the context of their data and so we kind of like, you use a lot of polls in Jive or you’re heavy in videos in Jive. Maybe we should talk more about that since you don’t use X, Y, or Z.

 
Danny: And I think with this too is this is, at the end of this would be to like finalize the actual budget. I think we originally give people like, what we estimate to be the.. So order of magnitude type of budget. And then this allows us to dig in even further and validate that estimate and put some good timelines in place. And what is each sprint focusing in on. And it really gives us the chance to dig into it, which is nice.

 
It’s sort of with every project getting over this sort of, we need more details in order to really come up with a sound estimate. We like doing these workshops because you can do a fixed price workshop, minimize the risk on both sides and then at the end of this validate the actual cost of the project and that’s nice. And then we’re also, I think we’re looking at some other methods of estimating and trying out some fixed price options and some interesting options that are coming up for us. So all good stuff. We have our own utility. I think this is awesome. This is actually grown through the years. Tell me more about what is the utility that we have for migrating customers. Tell me a little bit more about that, Kirk.

 
Kirk Liemohn: Sure. So, it’s several utilities and I don’t remember the year it started now, but it was several years ago. But we did it internally for ThreeWill. And so several of us had been on these projects. Chris Edwards was the first and he’s the one that started this whole, the technical aspect of it, and then we’ve all not piled on. But one utility that will start out with a customer is a size and utility that they can pull down from our website and they can run it against their Jive instance.

 
And it’ll give a table of information that they can pass back to us, so we can know how many types of different content items they have, how many places they have in Jive spaces, groups, projects, and then how many of each content type they have. And that’s really useful. We like to do that before a workshop. It lets us go in and talk about, what matters to them. We’ve had clients for example, that don’t have videos at all. Well then, let’s not spend any time talking about videos. So that’s really useful to get that done early on.

 
And then we’ve got other utilities and they run inside of a migration environment and we’ll set up this in migration environment. We prefer to do it in Azure. We can do it in the client’s tenant or our tenant. We’ve done it both ways. We have done in on-prem. It’s just there’s more red tape when we have to do that. But if we can do it in Azure, then we can set up security so that there’s certificates, VPNs required to get in the environment so it’s secure.

 
But from there we’ll run utilities that will pull content down from Jive, put it into some local storage in Azure, typically into the migration environment. And there’ll be in database format and file format. And then from there we can do other operations like transform that data. So you’ve got links that point to other contents in Jive, and we know that data’s moving to Microsoft 365. Then we can change those links to point to where they’re going to be and then we can upload those.

 
So there’s more to it than that. We’ll migrate permissions and other things. We’ve got scripts for provisioning that we tend to hand off to the clients. They can provision site collections and other things. And then we’ve got utility that will do some operations on Jive itself instead of just pulling content from Jive. As part of the migration, we want to be able to communicate to the user base.

 
And, one way to do that is through announcements in Jive, a banner that shows up kind of at the top of the Jive page that you’re on at a place. And that we’ve got a utility that’s the only utility we have that actually updates Jive. And we do that on purpose. We separate it out so we’re kind of like, okay, our primary migration utility, it doesn’t even know how to update to Jive. But this one utility does, it can put announcements out there on Jive and in some cases we’ve used it.

 
It’s got the ability to change permissions in Jive. So Jive doesn’t have a simple read only mode. You can set a place to like you can do that in SharePoint. You can kind of say, let’s make a site collection read only. But Jive doesn’t have that. So we’ve used that to change permissions in Jive for purposes like that. So you’ve migrated a place, you don’t want people to be making changes there, then that’s an option. I think that’s pretty much it. Those are our main sets of utilities.

 
Danny: So this is probably one of the most common questions that we get. And I know the answer changes on a monthly basis or a project by project basis, which is the, and this has to do with the utilities. What types of content do we migrate? So what’s the latest? We did this webinar three years ago. I’m sure there’s a couple more that we have as part of the content types that we migrate nowadays. Can you go through those with me?

 
Kirk Liemohn: Yeah. So in Jive, you’ve got places which are spaces, groups, projects, and then, inside of those places you have content and there’s different types of content. SharePoint has a concept of content types and so does Jive. In Jive the primary ones are documents except they kind of overload the term. You can kind of upload a file as a document or you can kind of write one using a whistle wig editor. It’s more of like a Wiki style document. We call those collaborative documents. And then when you upload a file, like an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF or word document, we call those binary files.

 
We certainly handle both of those. We handle discussions, Jive discussions and blog posts. And then some of the newer ones that certainly weren’t here last time we did this webinar. And then I think the others were, but this weren’t here then Jive events, Jive poles and Jive ideas. So we can migrate all of those. And each of those also has every content type in Jive. I think every content type allows comments on it or sometimes it’s called a message internally. And we migrate those. Some can have-

 
Danny: Nice.

 
Kirk Liemohn: Some can have attachments as well. Not all types, but some types can. I don’t think I mentioned videos, binary file. We do videos as well and photos. And then those are kind of the main types of content. But then there’s some metadata like, tags and categories and we didn’t use to migrate those. Probably we didn’t the last time this webinar was done, but now we do. And that can go to manage metadata in SharePoint or Microsoft 365.

 
And we do other things like, I already mentioned links that we transform those links so that you’re not… and we see this a lot in Jive where people have a link to another piece of content in Jive or to an attachment or to something else that they place inside of a piece of content, say a collaborative document or a blog post. We see that a lot. It’s kind of like a piece of content when you’re authoring content Jive.

 
And since we see that so much, we put a lot of effort into transforming those links so that when they’re migrated, even if it’s in a different place, we are aware of that and we can have that link work to point to its new location. And finally other system fields like, who created the documents, the modify by, created by and then the timestamps, the created dates and modified date. Those are all make it over as well.

 
Danny: I know you’re dying to tell me what we don’t migrate. Right?

 
Kirk Liemohn: Well, that’s one thing that the workshop is… I’m an engineer and so as Danny knows very well, I like to make sure-

 
Danny: You say that like I’m an alcoholics. I’m an alcoholic.

 
Kirk Liemohn: I like to make sure-

 
Danny: It’s good. It’s good.

 
Kirk Liemohn: It feels better. So I like to get it off my chest. Here’s the things we don’t do. And it’s important that the client realize this is what to expect.

 
Danny: Absolutely.

 
Kirk Liemohn: And the workshop goes into all the details. But they’re usually the lesser use types. So Jive tasks for example. Jive tasks are not very powerful and we don’t find clients who use them at all. Status updates. Those are like, well, I’m going out to lunch. Those are very ephemeral. They don’t really need to be migrated. There’s private messages. And then you can have shared links. Jive has a weird internal name for that. Bookmarks, announcements which we can put on Jive as part of the migration. Those we don’t migrate.

 
And then other things like follows and profile properties, we don’t try and migrate those. We can archive some of this stuff by the way, but we don’t have a place for it in Microsoft 365. The big ones that we don’t do that people would like us to do are pages, home pages and overview pages [inaudible 00:16:48] in those pages like tiles or widgets. Those are very custom. They’re basically little applications each widget or tile. And so it’s a lot more effort to make that happen and it’s usually a manual effort if it’s going to be done. And, so that’s, we have not chosen to migrate those yet through an automated fashion.

 
Danny: And you mentioned group and space membership. I don’t see in here like do we move user. What do we move about like user information?

 
Kirk Liemohn: No profile properties. So basically the users are already typically going to be synced up to Azure AD. So if you’re on your on-prem directory, you’re going to have that synced up to Azure ID when you’re on Microsoft 365. [inaudible 00:17:36] normal thing that people set up. And then in Jive, every user does have an email address and then that email just usually matches up to what we need it to match up to.

 
So there may be a transformation process we have to go through, but we usually can get that to work fairly well. Now what can happen is that people can leave the company and they no longer they are disabled or don’t exist in an active directory on-prem. They certainly don’t get synced up to Azure AD. And this is true with any type of migration. You’re going to have users that can’t migrate, but their content still will.

 
So we’ll migrate the content, but we can’t, in SharePoint, when we put this stuff over in Microsoft 365, we have to assign a created user and a modified user. And so we use what we call a default accounts and that’s something that’s configurable that you’ll tell us what that default account should be. You can create an unlicensed account if you want and we can use that.

 
Danny: It sounds like it’s maturing with each year. So that’s great to hear. Tell me about, archived content. What do we do with that? Well, like how does this, do we archive some of this or what do we… tell me a little bit more about that.

 
Kirk Liemohn: So usually at the end of a production migration, we want to give the client everything that we can from Jive, even if we didn’t migrate it. So during the beginning stages, and we’ll talk more about the different aspects of a migration, but at the beginning we’ll talk about, what places are going to migrate or not. We’ll go through a rationalization process even as early as a workshop where we’re trying to say where, what’s happening with content types, and then we’ll go from a Jive place basis, like what’s migrating and what’s not.

 
And, so regardless of whether it’s migrating or not, we can provide an archive of almost all your content in Jive. The types of things we can’t are those homepages. But even a lot of the other content types that we don’t migrate, we do have that information. And so it’s a very technical archive, but we’ll pull down that data. It’s in two formats. It’s in a database, it’s in a file system, and then we have a hand off process and that hand off process is physically getting those bits to the client.

 
And also, going over that, usually it’s two meetings to kind of go over how it’s organized and how they can find that data. But it’s not intended for end users to kind of come up and find a piece of content because whoever has access to this has access to all of the Jive content.

 
Danny: Awesome.

 
Rob Horton: Probably also worth noting that that’s in general our repository for these Jive migrations. And once we’ve archived that content, we can migrate from that archive even after their Jive license has expired so to speak.

 
Danny: That’s nice. I remember sort of the philosophy behind the utilities was let’s try to get everything out of Jive as soon as we can and get it, just to be able to pull all of the content down. And Kirk, just like you said, I’m an engineer. I have to say, I have to admit I’m a marketing guy and I won’t say-

 
Kirk Liemohn: [inaudible 00:20:55].

 
Danny: I used to be an engineer. And I used to say things like, “Okay, so we archive everything from Jive.” I’m not going to say that. I’m going to say we archive a lot of things from Jives. Is that better? Like I’m growing here.

 
Kirk Liemohn: Almost everything.

 
Danny: Almost everything. I didn’t say everything, almost everything. So there’s a little growth. I’m showing you some growth in my personal self as well. What’s up next? Rob, we haven’t forgot about you over there. [inaudible 00:21:24] I appreciate you hanging on to us. Tell me a little bit more about the different phases of the project, because I know we’ve, through the years have really tuned to these projects and we’re Agile on most projects and I know this, we’ve sort of really come up with a nice process behind the scenes for the different phases of these projects. Tell me more about that.

 
Rob Horton: Sure. We used to run these projects, almost strictly Agile and over the years we’ve come up with this hybrid approach where, the first part of the migration project is Agile. The things like developing new features for the utilities, some things like that. We do that with an Agile approach, which gets us to maximum value, and then we’ll move to more an iterative or a waterfall type approach as we’re into the pilot and production phases of the project.

 
So first we start out with an inventory and we try and do this just as early as we possibly can, even potentially before an engagement with a client if we have the access and the full inventory gives us a real clear picture of all of their content and where it’s located and what types of content they have. And from that we create an inventory spreadsheet. And this inventory spreadsheet, you can kind of think of that as the user interface into the migration. And that’s where we really configure the entire production migration through that spreadsheet.

 
So once we’ve got that inventory, and this usually happens around the time of a workshop, sometimes just before the workshop, which is ideal because then we go into that workshop knowing this information, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way and it happens just after the workshop right when the engagement starts. And once we’ve got that inventory we’ll do what we call burn in test.

 
And what the burn in test does is it sort of proves out that we have all the connectivity that we need to get to their Jive environment, to get to their SharePoint environment, whether it’s on-prem or online mostly now, and make sure that all that security is in place and that the security protocols that we put in place to protect information, make sure that that’s all running and that we can actually get water through the pipes is what they like to say.

 
So that’s the burn in test and it just helps us validate that, we’ve functionally everything works. [inaudible 00:23:59] is not quite configured how we want it for production, but just functionally there are no issues that we need to resolve. And then after the burn in tests, if there are any kind of tool updates, say a client comes to us and says, well, I know you handle this content this way and you put it in SharePoint as a let’s say, as a document in a document library. And we would like for you to wrap a modern page around these types of documents.

 
So that’s like an enhancement that we do all the time almost with every project and that’s just the development stage. And we’ll do that after the burn in test any kind of development, any customizations and utilities that this project has asked for. And if we do, do development, then we like to follow that up with an integration test, which is a sort of an enhanced burn in test. And it says, well, we’ve made some changes to the utilities. Just want to double check that we still have the connectivity that we’re expecting.

 
So we’ll do integration test after that. Once we’re through that phase, we’re still pushing up the hill to get the migration going. And then right at the top of the hill we’ll do a pilot and that pilot migration should be, everything we were going to do for production. So it’s communications, it’s announcements, it’s training, it’s remediation, it’s the actual migration. I’d say most of the time when we do the pilot migration, what we migrate during pilot lives on in production.

 
So it’s a way for, we typically target friends and family of the IT organization. But it’s a way for them to get their content migrated early. And that pilots usually last about two or three weeks and sometimes for weeks just to make sure we have everything set. We’ll make some enhancements and changes, configuration, any kind of development updates we need to briefly after the pilot. And then we’re right into production.

 
And what we’d like to do with production is, we use that inventory spreadsheet, we schedule it all out into waves and batches. And it is very prescriptive. Monday we’re doing this, Tuesday we’re doing that, week after week if it’s a large migration. And we don’t like to at that point make any changes to the utilities or the process just because, we like to push through at that point. Once production is done-

 
Danny: Awesome.

 
Rob Horton: … we’ll do… Yeah. Once production is done, we’ll do the archive of any content that we hadn’t scheduled to migrate. We’ll go ahead and pull into the archive and do any last minute project remediation we need to do.

 
Danny: And then if we’re helping out, let’s say the innovation practice is helping out with an intranet or helping out with the team’s roll out, they’re going in parallel to these efforts and is that true?

 
Rob Horton: Yeah. It’s definitely, we do a quite a bit of that. Well, we work within our innovation practice to, if they’re creating an intranet or templates, we’re working side by side with them and we weave their project to some of their outputs into, inputs into our project and vice versa. And then finally, after the migration is complete, a lot of times we’ll do adoption change management with a client to make sure that, and this is really important for clients that maybe Jive has become stagnant, and contents become stagnant.

 
We want to sort of reintroduce the users to that content because, it was valuable enough for the organization to migrate it. I want to make sure that it’s relevant and find-able and usable in their new environment. So that’s a very important piece. That’s the part of these projects where they’re really realizing the value of the migration, because now the contents of the new location and users are able to consume it.

 
Danny: Thank you. So the next question is mine. I get a question. All right. I love it. Before I go into that, I know for folks, if you’re joining late, feel free to ask a question, through the go to webinar panel. Also if you’re watching this later on and this is up in hosted on our website, feel free to leave a comment that has a question in there and we’ll follow up with that as well. So my question, and of course I have to answer this like I’m a marketer. But, the question is and everybody asks is how much does it cost to do these migrations? And as a good marketer I will answer that question with an analogy.

 
When I see this, I say, well, how much does a car cost? Or, you can get a car for a couple hundred bucks to, hundreds of thousands of dollars if it’s some vintage car. Probably a better analogy for this would be how much does a house cost? You do have some of these options with tiny houses where somebody can get something in the tens of thousands of dollars, and then, houses can go up greater than a million bucks.

 
What we try to do is a lot of this has to do with, how important your Jive content is because that’s sort of the key factor with this is, what happens if you lose this content? What happens if all of a sudden, one day [inaudible 00:29:32] and really, if you think about it, there’s how many hundreds or thousands of hours has been put into the content that’s been created on Jive? And just getting rid of that, you really have to factor that in as you roll out to a new intranet.

 
And also like think about sort of the psychology of this as well, is if you’re rolling out a new intranet and you’re trying to drive people to use that new intranet, if you just took away everything that they put their work in and you didn’t save any of that, how much would they want to invest in the new intranet? So there’s a real problem there where if one day they’ve got all this content and the next day it’s gone, any rational human being would say, I don’t trust it.

 
And that is one of the most important things that people who use intranet, they want to be able to trust the platform that things that are there, that they’re storing and they’re spending lots of hours on will be there the next day. And so I really challenge people when they look at these costs to weigh it against the, what is going to happen if we just all of a sudden get rid of this content.

 
We also, I mean, a part of this as well is we’re typically use working with the larger organizations. We’ve worked with some of the largest rollouts of Jive in the world. And, so it can be the tens of thousands up or tens of thousands, probably even over a hundred, and helping them with doing this. And so when you start talking about the larger groups and the larger amounts of content, some of this just really makes sense for them to migrate all of that content over.

 
And then the other benefit, which is what Rob brought up initially is the cost, and then the loss of innovation that they’re seeing right now and the tie in. Microsoft is just pouring it on with them, both Microsoft 365 and Azure. And so people really, if they want to innovate, they’re seeing, we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to move over to Microsoft. And so I would say at a high level, the cost to do it, we are working on the lower end.

 
I know Rob and his team were sort of challenging them to say how much [inaudible 00:31:59] some of the mid size migrations, how can we package that up? And for it to be in the tens of thousands of dollars, we sort of, we typically would walk away from this projects, but now we’re looking into the options of, can we package this up so that even some of our mid market or smaller clients where we can help them to at least either to archive or to get the content out and get it to a place and how can we minimize the variables and the costs that are involved with doing the migration?

 
And to be quite frank, some of our clients that have spent in the upper hundreds of thousands of dollars and saw tremendous of benefit. It wasn’t like they spent the money and were upset about having to spend the money. They were excited about the… And these are typically ones where we’re also helping out with the intranet. They’re very excited about what they get in their new intranet and not losing any of that organizational content and knowledge.

 
So it’s for some of the organizations out there, they really see that, hey, we’ve got to make this move. We’ve got to continue to innovate and we can’t lose the content. We can’t lose the things that people had been working on for the last couple of years. We can’t do that. And so they reach out to us and they invest quite a bit of money to do this and we help them do it right. So did I answer? I should just answer with it depends. All right. The ultimate consultant.

 
Kirk Liemohn: You could have said all of that it depends and that would have been fine.

 
Danny: It depends. And I think I could say like, factors on whether do you want to have a small house or a tiny house or do you want to have a mid size house or a large house? And the costs are somewhat in line with that. But again, do the sizing tool and we can give you a wrong to sort of, not waste your time or our time with this. So reach out to us. And I also want to talk to you sort of about maybe some of the benefits that you’re missing of making the move. All right. I’m all done. I had my question. I’ve got one coming up too there. How exciting. So this is one to the both of you. What are some of the biggest takeaways from these types of migrations? Ready? Three, two, one.

 
Kirk Liemohn: You can go first, Rob.

 
Rob Horton: Sure. Like, I think one of our big takeaways and variably this happens when we work with a client, they’re like, “Well, we’re on Jive now. We want to go to SharePoint and we want it to look just like Jive. We want all the same features.” It’s just like for like is a term we hear, and they’re not the same platforms. Jive was designed as a collaborative platform from the ground up and it has not been innovated, not changed or updated in years.

 
Whereas SharePoint changes every month. And they’re two entirely different platforms. They both have their strengths and they both have their weaknesses. And we work with clients to mitigate what they may see as a risk or a weakness within SharePoint as well as maximize what SharePoint does really well and what Microsoft 365 does really well.

 
Danny: And you guys have been hitting on this all along, which is a lot of these things come into change management. I mean, we’re moving from one platform to another platform and it’s not, we’re doing a part of it, which is the actual lifting of one and all that what does it take to do it. But there’s also an organizational component of this, which is, it is not the same thing. It’s not like they show up, they leave on Friday and it’s Jive and they show up on Monday and it’s Microsoft 365 and it looks just like it.

 
You have to have the training, you have to have the rollout, you have to have the people that can support it. A lot of change management things come up and I think we’re really, that’s a place where we’re shining nowadays. Even the messaging stuff for people who are in Jive and the messaging and communication out. So hopefully I didn’t steal what you’re going to say. Go Kirk.

 
Kirk Liemohn: No, I got several things to say. But along the lines of change management, I mean, we certainly can help out with that because we’ve got a lot of experience doing these, and so we know kind of how our process has to work in with various different clients we’ve had. And we also know, as you said, we can’t do it overnight, so there’s going to be a rollout. We can do things like delta’s, I didn’t mention that before, but we can do an initial migration.

 
Danny: What’s a delta?

 
Kirk Liemohn: You take any changes since the last migration. So, typically we might migrate a set of places, maybe a large set of places over a period of time. And then, only give the owners access to those places. Maybe they start setting up the home pages and do some other things in there. And then maybe over a long weekend we’ll do migration where we take all the changes that have happened over the last two or three weeks or whatever it is and push those out. So those recent changes from Jive can make it to Microsoft 365. And that’s just new data layered onto the data we’ve already migrated. And in some migration tools they call those an incremental. We tend to call them delta.

 
Danny: Nice.

 
Kirk Liemohn: Another thing I’d like to kind of piggyback on what Rob was saying before about, these being apples and oranges in terms of, SharePoint and Jive or Microsoft 365 and Jive. He mentioned how, or maybe it was you Danny, of the how SharePoint is changing all the time. And it is. The goalposts are moving on us all the time and we would like to be at a steady state where we can just say, you know what, there’s no new innovation we need to do to our migration utilities to move into the new platform.

 
And it’s, we’re getting pretty far along in that. But they do keep changing. There’s like, two years ago, modern experience, modern pages, modern sites came upon us and we had to change our process to kind of deal with that. And there’s other things that are going to be coming out too, where there’s certain API’s don’t exist for certain things in Microsoft 365 yet. And once those do, then, maybe that’s something we can do for our clients.

 
So, there’s always going to be changes because it’s an ever changing platform. And we are mature in what we’ve got out there and what we can do. But if we want to take advantage of some new latest thing, maybe we need to be tweaking our migration to handle that. Maybe we don’t, but in some cases we might need to or we might want to.

 
Danny: Like two years ago, I don’t even know if Teams was around. I don’t know when it came out, but it’s amazing how fast it’s taken off. I have to ask this. This is my personal question. I love throwing curve balls at people live.

 
Kirk Liemohn: I’m ready.

 
Danny: Teams and… Are you ready?

 
Kirk Liemohn: I am ready.

 
Danny: Teams and Yammer sort of how does that, with those two, because how does that factor into all of this?

 
Kirk Liemohn: All right, I’ll take it. But Rob you can tell me to stop getting too technical if I do.

 
Danny: All right. Let’s do this.

 
Kirk Liemohn: Because I will. I’ll start with Teams. So Teams to me is a natural fit from the standpoint of a group in Jive is similar to a team in Teams. They have a similar purpose. It’s a collaboration environment where everyone’s kind of a member of the group or the team. It’s different than a communication side and SharePoint or maybe a space in Jive where it’s, you’re kind of pushing that information out. It’s very few people are making changes and a lot of viewers.

 
So there are a lot of similarities. However, Teams does not have the API that it’s really good with migrations yet. So there are some tools out there that try and migrate certain things to Teams. They can’t set the timestamp. They can’t set the user. They can’t even create chats on an individual thread. So there’s a lot they can’t do yet because the API is not there and we are in and contact with Teams about that.

 
What we can do is we can work with our clients to move contents, move binary content files into appropriate folders so they’re surfaced well in Teams. So Teams uses something called channels. Every channel is basically, or it has a folder in SharePoint for all of its file-based content. And we can migrate all the file based content to those folders so that they show up in the appropriate channel for you.

 
And it could be a general channel or it could be something else or it could be a sub folder of one of those if you want. So Yammer. I’ll mention the Yammer for a second. This is technical too. Yammer, they were stagnant for quite awhile actually, where they weren’t innovating much at all. They’ve done a little bit of innovation lately. But their API will let us set the author, but it won’t let us set a timestamp.

 
And it gets a little messy when you try to do some threaded conversations and tie it back to a piece of content, that maybe lives in SharePoint and maybe you want a Yammer web part on a page that has that. So we’ve done some work in that area. But it’s not something we recommend doing. But we’re certainly interested or we would like to have conversations about that. Maybe there is something that can be done there.

 
I think Yammer has gotten better in terms of things like now maybe has Q and A, which it didn’t before. And I believe it has rich texts capability, which it didn’t before. And Jive is all rich text. So if you’re going to lose that rich text, you’re going to move it into pure plain text. That’s going to be rough.

 
Danny: Nice. You handle that curve ball with style. I like it. Next question. What advice would you guys give, looking to do this type of migration?

 
Kirk Liemohn: Go for it, Rob.

 
Rob Horton: I think a couple things. One is to take the opportunity to clean up your content. We have a lot of methods, when we do this mapping process of, here’s your content in Jive and this is where it’s going in SharePoint. Throughout that we have a lot of methods to help say for example, we have a feature called content sense and we can say, okay, for this place only migrate content that was created January 1st, 2018 or after.

 
And let’s leave the older content in the archive, and not bring that over to SharePoint. That’s just one example. I have a lot of different examples on how we can help shape the content that you’re actually migrating. And that helps to clean up some stuff that’s just of lower value. When you do that you’re starting out fresh with a new environment and it’s more relevant and people are going to be more engaged and also it lowers your costs. You’re not migrating content that’s low value or no value or liability even. So, that’s like one thing for sure.

 
I think another thing is that we’re treating the Jive migration as a means to an end and not be shortsighted on the environment that you’re bringing the content to, think about what you’re trying to accomplish with your Microsoft 365 or your SharePoint on-prem. If it’s an intranet and you want this content to exist there, put time and effort into that and make sure that migrating the content is one piece of that because you want to be ultimately, you want that content to be relevant and accessible and valuable to your user base.

 
Kirk Liemohn: And I would add that, we can help a lot with change management, but it’s something you definitely need to expect to spend time on. When you’re doing one of these migrations, you’ve got to have a person or a team devoted to this that’s around change management. You probably want someone around training, you want to help out adoption. We can get it over there and then, but when you don’t have change management, people are just going to be, who moved my cheese and what’s going on.

 
And so you want to work with your community to make it as seamless a transition as possible. Especially given that it is two different platforms you’re moving from and it is going to change for them. It’s going to be different. So I think you really want to do that and then start that communication early. We’ve worked with clients where some of them are like, “We’re just going to kind of surprise them here in a little bit.”

 
Where we’re trying to push them to, now’s the time to go ahead and give them a heads up and put a FAQ out there that they can read, especially for owners maybe. And but maybe for everyone and start giving people a heads up what’s coming, what they can do to make this seem more seamless for them. Maybe there’s some cleanup they can do. So things like that.

 
Rob Horton: I would piggy back on what Kirk said. The earlier, if you’re considering a migration off of Jive, the earlier you do it the better. A lot of times the deadline for our clients is their Jive, their renewal of their license. They don’t want to renew it. Jive is very strict about that. They don’t offer partial renewals. It’s, you’ve got to pay for another year. And we will have, clients invariably come to us and say, well, our license is expiring next month and we really don’t want to renew it.

 
And that’s where it’s just too late in the process at that point for us to get everything going to get all their content off. So plant early, start thinking about this. If Jive is not your strategic platform of the future, then have a conversation with us. Even if you’re planning to do something different, reach out to us. We can help. Even if we’re not ultimately the ones that do the migration for you, we can… we’ve talked to a lot of clients in the more positions. So definitely reach out earlier. It’s earlier the better.

 
Danny: It’s well over 100 folks and these are larger companies that we’ve talked to through the years. And you’re absolutely right. Whether you’re going to end up using our services or not, it’s just good to talk about it. And there’s even some guidance we can provide around doing manual migrations and that sort of stuff. I think the big thing for us is, now this was the original reason why we ended up.

 
I mean, we were big Jive proponents way back when and the reason was, was because they were out innovating Microsoft. And nowadays as I mentioned earlier, that it’s changed. It’s a different world where Microsoft is moving fast and Jive is hardly moving at all. So for the same reasons that we have before for really liking what Jive was doing. Nowadays we’re in reverse and we’re seeing the benefits that people will get out of moving from Jive and over onto Microsoft 365. So along those lines. Go ahead. You want to add something?

 
Kirk Liemohn: No. I was going to throw in that, just from another thing to be aware of that, some clients will look at different ways of setting up their intranet on Microsoft 365 and there are these internet in a box vendors out there.

 
Danny: Good point.

 
Kirk Liemohn: We have worked with several of them actually during a Jive migration. I would still take a look at what’s out of the box with the new modern capability, that makes it simpler for us than to try and work with maybe an API that’s coming along with another internet of box vendor, and that there’s a lot of innovation going on there. So, just keep that option open is what I would recommend. And certainly we can help out with our innovation practice of helping to create a intranet, if you’ve got a Greenfield and Microsoft 365, basically.

 
Danny: Well, this is kind of breaking news for us, but I heard from Sam Marshall who puts together the SharePoint intranet in a box. He’s from ClearBox over in the UK. And we actually have an annual podcasts that we do together, shorter to catch up on things and talk about things like, when is it going to be the point in time in which, essentially SharePoint online outpaces some of these SharePoint in a box vendors.

 
And, I think we’ve seen over the last couple of years where it’s trending to people just using the modern experience. But I have, there’s a chance I’ll be helping out with a couple of their reviews or helping out with the product that they’re putting together. They have a great report. You can download an executive version of the report for free. So that’s clearbox.uk. And if you haven’t heard of that and you’re looking at a SharePoint intranet in a box, that’s definitely a great resource that you want to pay for and download.

 
So this last part. I mean, if you’re looking at doing this, we have an ultimate guide up on our website. So if you go to the homepage, you’ll see on the homepage, sort of the second part of it is a link to all of the different ultimate guides that ThreeWill has. We have an ultimate guide to moving from Jive to Microsoft 365 and it just really covers a lot of the things that we’ve discussed in this webinar.

 
But you pick up on a couple of other things that are in there as well. At the bottom of that ultimate guide, you’ll see the, all of the different blog posts and podcasts and what we’ve been doing through the years. So this is a tremendous resource for you to go and check out from the ThreeWill website. I definitely encourage you guys to do this. I’ll make sure that, in the followup email you get a link to that, but it’s very easy to get to.

 
Just go to our homepage at threewill.com and then scroll down, you’ll see ultimate guides and then just select the ultimate guide moving from Jive to Microsoft 365. The other thing I want to point out is, there’s a lot of what we’re doing in here that could apply to other platforms. And so a focus last year was for us to look at all of the different platforms that are there. And I think, you can reuse some of this, the process and the change management pieces and all we’ll need to do is really to look at, building off the utilities for these different platforms.

 
But we’ve started talking and focusing in on things like Slack. We’ve got a high level Slack to Microsoft 365 migration guide. So a lot of people are looking at this and seeing the overlap with Microsoft. So I’d definitely take a look at that and see what’s in there. And those are off of, just go to our homepage and you’ll see a listing of ultimate guides there. Well, what are we looking at? Do we have any questions if you have any questions? I don’t think I see any. So that’s fine.

 
We’d love to talk to you in person. That’s even better. So if you’d like to talk in person, just go to the ThreeWill website, click on contact us, you’ll see it up in the upper right hand corner. Fill that out, I’ll get an email, we’ll follow up. We’ll set up a convenient time to talk and I’ll pull in the right people for the discussion. But let’s just come up with a plan for you to move off of Jive and over on to Microsoft 365 and we’d love to help you out with that. Kirk, thank you for your time. Rob, thank you for your time.

 
Rob Horton: You’re welcome.

 
Danny: Appreciate that.

 
Kirk Liemohn: My pleasure.

 
Danny: Is this going to be something I’ll see you in three years and we’ll do this again? Maybe we do this every three years. Who knows? But I appreciate you guys. Part of my job is to take what is going on in ThreeWill and sort of get it out to the public. And I know this takes time to prepare for these things, but it’s really important because you guys are just doing tremendous work on projects. And I’m just excited about what you guys are doing. Rob, I’ll give you 30 seconds here. You’re starting up a new practice called the transformation practice. Tell me a little bit more about that.

 
Rob Horton: Great. Appreciate the opportunity. I’m the practice owner for transformation now here at ThreeWill. Part of it includes migration also includes application modernization. So if you’ve got an application that’s, in say SharePoint or it’s an on-prem environment and you want to take advantage of the sort of work anywhere on cloud environment, we’ll help analyze that to application and come up with solutions to modernize it and bring it into sort of the 21st century, if you will. And that’s a big part of the practice.

 
We also do a lot of SharePoint to SharePoint migrations and we’re working on tenant consolidations through mergers and acquisitions. So anything where you’re looking to transform your digital estate, we’re hoping that you’ll consider ThreeWill for that. And we’re continuing to increase the service offerings that we have in that area. And I’m really looking forward to it. This is new for ThreeWill. I’ve been a practice owner for about two months and really excited about what 2020 is going to bring for the company.

 
Danny: We’re excited for you to lead this up. We all know, I mean, this is really completing division for us, for digital workplaces. I mean, you need to have, this idea of not only migrating off of other platforms on to Microsoft 365, but also getting your applications up and running and Azure and modernizing your applications. We’re really getting to the point where it’s all in one place and people are getting work done.

 
It is the digital workplace. It’s where they collaborate and where they have their line of business applications. This is all really good stuff and we’re really fortunate to have you lead this up and we’re excited about what’s happening in the next couple of years with this practice. Thanks again guys. Thank you everyone for listening and have a wonderful day. Thank you. Bye bye.

 
Kirk Liemohn: Bye.

 

 

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