If you're just beginning to plan your Office 365 rollout (or are in the process of rolling out additional Office 365 applications), it's important to consider the benefits of running a formal pilot program. A pilot enables a subset of users to access Office 365 prior to its rollout to the entire organization. There are many benefits to running a pilot, including:
- Road-testing your communications and training. I host weekly Q&A calls for my pilot testers. The calls enable pilot participants to provide feedback on their experience, highlight favorite features, identify gaps in our training materials, recommend new methods for engaging business teams, etc. This feedback is key because it comes from the business. Whenever possible, I like to test out the pilot users' training ideas during the pilot itself. If they request a What is Office 365 training session, I'll assemble a training curriculum and offer the new class to the pilot group. Taking this extra step during the pilot enables me to gather more feedback and puts me in the best possible position for my org-wide rollout.
- Building a knowledgeable set of pilot users that can support your rollout and (hopefully) recommend Office 365 to their colleagues. Giving users early access to Office 365 and offering them the opportunity to impact your rollout builds rapport. This enhanced sense of community engagement will help you build momentum for your rollout, enhancing user adoption.
- Testing your license enablement and support processes. As part of your pilot, you'll need to enable Office 365 applications for your pilot testers. You'll also need to provide support as they begin using the products. This is an excellent opportunity to test (and improve) your licensing and support processes. After all, pilot testers are more likely to forgive enablement issues and support delays. And learning from your mistakes during a pilot will ensure the same mistakes don't occur during your org-wide rollout!
- Identifying use cases and success stories. Ideally, your pilot testers will be leveraging the new capabilities they've received. Consider setting up time for them to show off their results. You may find unexpected use cases for Office 365 and success stories that highlight key value-adds. Leverage these use cases and success stories to tell the story of Office 365's business value.
- Validating your governance and compliance policies. A pilot program enables you to see how Office 365 performs in your environment. Your networking team can validate network traffic is flowing smoothly. Your information security team can validate all appropriate risk requirements have been met. If you have compliance or legal record hold requirements, those teams can validate to ensure data is being scanned, stored, and supervised appropriately. If there are issues, you have time to correct before Office 365 is rolled out to your entire organization.
Pilot Planning
But how big should your pilot be? And how long should it last? The scale of your pilot should reflect the size of your organization and the level of governance and compliance controls you need to implement.
Can you have two minecraft accounts on one computer. As a general rule, I recommend building a pilot program that is roughly 3% of your overall user base. If you'll be rolling out Office 365 to 10,000 users, that would mean having a pilot group of 300. If you have a user base of 50,000, you'd want to build a pilot group of 1,500. While this 3% target may sound large, it affords the best opportunity for user feedback. Keep in mind that you cannot expect strong participation from all pilot users. No matter how well-intentioned, there is always a percentage of pilot testers that contribute minimally or not at all. Targeting 3% of your user base ensures you will have a viable set of pilot testers to try out your products.
Your pilot program will also enable you to test key governance and compliance controls (e.g. archival and supervision of Outlook email, record retention, SharePoint hub site governance, etc.). In order to run a valid test, you will need a sufficient data sample size. If 3% of your user base will not give you enough data to work with, increase the size of your pilot group accordingly. It is always best to adjust any necessary governance policies or security and archival controls before your org-wide implementation.
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Now that you have a rough idea of your pilot size, it's time to start planning who should be part of the pilot. Ideally, you should target:
- Sign in to the Office 365 portal. Locate Users Active users (or Groups Shared mailboxes if you set this on a shared mailbox). Select a user who has a Microsoft Exchange mailbox. On the flyout menu on the right, locate Mail settings Automatic replies (if it's a shared.
- Users experience issues when they try to sign out of Office 365, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft Azure in a web browser. For example, users may experience one of the following issues: When a user signs out of one of the portals or signs out of Microsoft Outlook Web App, the user isn't signed out of Microsoft SharePoint Online.
- Microsoft 365 has all the familiar Office apps and more in one place. Work, learn, collaborate, connect, and create with Microsoft 365.
- However, if you use Outlook with Office 365 Home, Outlook.com, Hotmail or Gmail, you can find an out-of-office 'hack', that's a bit of hassle but gets the job done, on Microsoft's Office support site.
- Highly engaged users from across multiple business lines (not just IT).
- Green dot and yellow dot users that are quick to adapt to change.
- Volunteers. Always engage those who want to be part of your pilot. These users are more likely to engage, will dedicate more time, and are much more likely to provide feedback. While it may be more work to amass a set of volunteer resources, they will be more engaged and provide better feedback than voluntold users.
- Strong communicators. Feedback is an essential part of the pilot process. You want to engage those that are willing to provide written or verbal feedback.
- A variety of personality types. Ideally, you want to include technology optimists and pessimists in your pilot group. Technology optimists have a good impression of IT and are generally enthusiastic about trying out new technologies. Technology pessimists have a stronger 'what's in it for me' mentality and need to see or hear something compelling before they decide to jump on board. Incorporating both technology optimists and pessimists in your pilot will give you the best opportunity to validate your Office 365 messaging and training.
How long should your pilot last? While many companies have intense pressure to roll Office 365 out quickly, I'm a firm believer in meaningful pilots. The more time spent piloting and refining your approach to governance, training, and license enablement, the more successful your rollout will be. A pilot period of 3 weeks is incredibly tight, but can generate value. A pilot period of 1-2 months will generate more user data and enable you to refine your training offerings.
There is one exception to this 'lengthier is better' rule for pilots. If you work for a company with a strong technology innovation culture and most of your users are very comfortable with technology change, a longer pilot may not be necessary. If your organization is facing a great deal of technology debt in the workforce productivity space, a longer pilot will better enable you to build momentum for the upcoming change.
Pilot execution
Now that you've completed your pilot planning, it's time to execute your vision. Plan to launch your pilot with a formal series of kickoff meetings, brown-bag lunches, and/or targeted pilot communications. The goal is to celebrate this important stage of your Office 365 rollout efforts. And the more positive noise you can generate, the more pilot user engagement you'll see.
You'll also want to make it easy for pilot users to learn about Office 365 and provide feedback on their experience. A few ideas I've seen work well:
- Share 'getting started' scenarios. Many users may feel intimidated when they first open a new Office 365 app. Providing quick, easy-to-follow 'getting started' scenarios for each app gives your pilot users a running start. If you're going to pilot OneDrive for Business, for example, you could create getting-started scenarios that explain how to:
- Create files in OneDrive
- Save Microsoft Office files to OneDrive
- Share a OneDrive file (or folder) with someone
- See OneDrive files that have been shared with you
- Open files using the OneDrive sync client
- Edit files in the OneDrive mobile app
- Host weekly Q&A sessions. As I mentioned previously, I host weekly Q&A calls for my pilot testers. The calls enable pilot participants to provide feedback on their experiences and ask product-related questions.
- Schedule 'Show & Tell' events where pilot users can share Office 365 tips and demo solutions they've built. Provide an opportunity for your pilot users to shine. Schedule a recurring meeting where the pilot users come together to share cool new tricks they've learned and demo solutions they've built in Office 365. For best results, keep this a peer-to-peer sharing meeting. Having a pilot user demonstrate a new Microsoft Flow they've built is powerful stuff. Their excitement and confidence in using Office 365 will motivate other pilot users to follow suit.
- Build a private Yammer group for your pilot users. Yammer is a great 'thinking out loud' app that supports discussion and sharing of ideas. I recommend creating a private Yammer group where pilot users can share insights, ask questions, etc. Add all pilot testers to the group before your pilot begins and send them the group URL for easy reference. As the pilot coordinator, it's important you actively participate in the Yammer group. Share Office 365 tips, provide links to appropriate training resources, and answer pilot user questions.
- Track your pilot user Yammer sentiment. If you're providing your pilot users with a Yammer group for sharing ideas, use Microsoft Flow and Azure Cognitive Services to perform sentiment analysis on the pilot Yammer posts. The sentiment data gathered may provide insights into your pilot group's overall satisfaction with Office 365 and help you identify solution use cases.
- Stay in touch. I always want my pilot testers to feel like they are part of a valued community. Connect with pilot users that are in your geographic area by hosting meet-ups or coffee chats. Communicate with geographically-distributed pilot users via Yammer or Teams. And share an 'Office 365 tip of the week' for all pilot users.
Cleanmymac 3 8 6 torrent. Want to learn more?
Asif Rehmani published a great article on the key reasons to include an early adopter program in your Office 365 rollout. Check it out–it's well worth a read!
Note
Office 365 ProPlus is being renamed to Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise. For more information about this change, read this blog post.
Problem
Users experience issues when they try to sign out of Office 365, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft Azure in a web browser. For example, users may experience one of the following issues:
When a user signs out of one of the portals or signs out of Microsoft Outlook Web App, the user isn't signed out of Microsoft SharePoint Online.
When a user signs out of SharePoint Online, the user isn't signed out of the portal or Outlook Web App.
When a user clicks Sign out, the user isn't signed out. Instead, the web browser reloads the current webpage.
If your Microsoft account ends in the '.edu' domain extension and is managed by your university domain administrator, or if your Microsoft account was registered or is still registered in Office 365, you may see one of the following messages:
Solution
To resolve this issue, use one of the following methods.
Method 1: Sign out and then sign in to https://mail.office365.com to access your mailbox
If you're receiving the 'We're having trouble signing you in' error message, see 'We're having trouble signing you in' message when you try to access your mail in Office 365.
Method 2: Close and reopen all web browsers
Close all web browsers and then reopen them.
To end the task for your browser, follow these steps:
Right-click the taskbar, and then click Task Manager.
Click the Details tab, and then do one of the following:
If you're using Internet Explorer, find iexplore.exe in the list, right-click it, and then click End task.
Note Make sure that you end the Iexplore.exe task. Do not end the Explore.exe task.
If you're using Mozilla Firefox, find and right-click firefox.exe in the list, and then click End task.
If you're using Apple Safari, find and right-click safari.exe in the list, and then click End task.
If you're using Google Chrome, find and right-click chrome.exe in the list, and then click End task.
Note
- If more than one browser is listed, end the task for each browser.
- If you're using a different browser than those that are listed here, end the task for that browser.
Method 3: Sign out of all Microsoft online services
You may be signed in to another Microsoft online service, and this may be preventing you from signing out. If this is the case, sign out of all Microsoft online services. To do this, follow these steps:
- Go to https://login.microsoftonline.com/logout.srf, and then sign out (if you aren't already signed out).
- Go to https://login.live.com/logout.srf, and then sign out (if you aren't already signed out).
Method 4: Clear cookies from the web browser
Clear cookies from the web browser, and then try signing out again. The steps for doing this vary, depending on the browser that you're using. For more information, see the following resources:
- If you're using Internet Explorer, see How to delete cookie files in Internet Explorer .
- If you're using Google Chrome, see Manage your cookies and site data.
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Microsoft provides third-party contact information to help you find technical support. This contact information may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this third-party contact information.
More information
This behavior is by design. Azure Active Directory-based services (including Office 365, Azure, and Intune) use cookies to remember who you are and to automatically sign you in.
The sign-out process for services forces the session cookies to expire. These session cookies are used to maintain your sign-in state when you use these services. However, because the web browser is still running and may not be updated to handle cookies correctly, you may have a cookie that is not updated to expire and finish the sign-out process. By default, these cookies are valid for eight hours or are set to expire when you close all web browsers.
Office 365 Login Portal
Still need help? Go to Microsoft Community or the Azure Active Directory Forums website.
