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☁️ Cloud 6 min read18 February 2025

The Stress-Free Guide to Microsoft 365 Migration for Watford Businesses

Still running email on your own server? Here is why — and how — to move to Microsoft 365 without any downtime.

W

Watford IT Support

Business Together Limited · Watford

Hundreds of Watford businesses are still running their email and file storage on ageing on-premise servers. The servers are expensive to maintain, create security risks, and make remote working difficult.

Microsoft 365 solves all three problems — and migration is far simpler than most business owners expect.

What you get with Microsoft 365

For a predictable monthly cost per user, Microsoft 365 gives you:

- Business email (Outlook) with 50GB per mailbox

- Microsoft Teams for internal communication and video calls

- The full Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)

- 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage per user

- SharePoint for shared files and collaboration

- Enterprise-grade security built in

For most businesses with 5-20 users, the Microsoft 365 Business Standard plan at £10.30/user/month covers everything.

How migration works

A proper Microsoft 365 migration takes 1-2 weeks and involves zero downtime. Here is the process we use for Watford businesses:

Week 1: We set up your Microsoft 365 tenant, configure your domain, and create all user accounts. Your current email keeps running — nothing changes yet.

Migration day: We synchronise all existing email to the new system. Your team starts using Outlook/Teams while the old system remains live as a fallback.

Week 2: We move files to OneDrive and SharePoint, configure any shared drives, and decommission the old server once everything is confirmed working.

Common concerns answered

"Will we lose any emails?" No. We verify the full email migration before switching over.

"Can we keep our existing email addresses?" Yes. Your @yourbusiness.co.uk addresses stay exactly the same.

"What about our shared drives?" We migrate all content to SharePoint or OneDrive as part of the project.

Get in touch for a free Microsoft 365 assessment — we will tell you exactly what is involved for your specific setup.

#Watford#Hertfordshire#SME#Cloud

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