Roll out SharePoint and OneDrive

Be sure you've reviewed these SharePoint and OneDrive deployment resources before you start your rollout.

Also, make sure your migration plans are in place as you roll out.

We highly recommend rolling SharePoint and OneDrive out to a pilot group before rolling them out to your entire organization. A pilot program can help you test your business processes and determine if there's further change management or training needed to help your users succeed with SharePoint and OneDrive.

Pilot rollout of SharePoint and OneDrive

We recommend that you start with a small pilot and then increase in scope and speed of rollout as you review feedback from the pilot group and make changes where needed.

For each phase of the pilot, you'll need to train the users in your pilot group, and then give them access to SharePoint and OneDrive. This may include migrating content for them (or allowing them to do so themselves) or setting up SharePoint Server hybrid.

Create success criteria so you'll know when it's time to expand the pilot and when to roll out SharePoint and OneDrive more broadly.

Be sure there's a process to collect information from pilot users and allow them to report issues. If your help desk or support personnel are involved in the pilot process, they may be able to manage this with existing processes.

Do a small initial pilot

For the initial pilot phase, consider the following:

  • Depending on how technical your users are, you may want to do the initial pilot with highly technical users, such as people in your IT department.

  • Exclude users who need to interact with your customers regularly. Pilot users will be using new processes for the first time. To give your customers the best service, you may want to leave customer-facing people out of the initial pilot.

Use this initial pilot phase to validate some core business processes and workflows and to train your support or help desk personnel.

Expand the pilot

Once the initial pilot users are successfully using SharePoint and OneDrive, extend the pilot to a wider variety of users. We recommend that you create a group of knowledgeable stakeholders across departments and disciplines to specifically test the core use cases you've identified for SharePoint and OneDrive.

Monitor the pilot as it proceeds. When the people involved are able to easily accomplish the expected tasks, consider rolling the pilot out to a larger group.

Once the people in your pilot group are able to validate the expected use cases and the number of issues reported is low, consider scheduling the remaining rollout for the rest of the organization.

Rolling out SharePoint and OneDrive broadly

Once your pilot program has concluded successfully, you can roll SharePoint and OneDrive out to the rest of your organization.