Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Georgia State, we had used a product called GroupWise for over a decade. So when you use
a computer tool that's tied to communication for 10 years, or probably even less than that,
people get an emotional attachment to it, even if it's not a particularly good or powerful
or useful tool. So the mindset of a lot of the staff and faculty at Georgia State was,
"Wow, I'm giving up this tool. I have all this data in it, emails from 10 years ago
that I really want to keep. I don't want to lose this and you're going to make me switch
tools. GroupWise is working just fine for me. Why do I have to make this change?" So
we sort of had to sell it to the user community and we had a lot of town halls, we had a lot
of videos that we made, instructional videos. We called them Outlook Positive videos, trying
to put a positive spin on moving to Microsoft Outlook, all kinds of things like that. We
had a website that was very much like a blog, but also a timeline that updated daily with
things that were happening. "Here's what we're doing today to get ready for the migration.
Here are things that you can do to help us prepare for the migration. If you can delete
any emails out of your old GroupWise account that you don't need anymore, that's less that
we'll have to migrate over into Office 365." So constant communication with our clients
and customers, that was essential, and making them feel like they were part of the process,
because they were. We couldn't have done it without them. So all of those things combined,
and then after we actually implemented Office 365, to have daily training sessions and updates
on, "Here are the cool things you can do in Office 365 that you could have never done
in GroupWise. Here are the easy things that you can do to send an email, to make attachments,
to schedule appointments. All of these things you can do on your Mac, on your PC. You can
use the Outlook client on your machine, or you can go to the Office 365 website, whatever
you prefer," and people were sold. It did take a bit of time, because you have that
emotional attachment to an old product, but that was the big thing, selling it to them,
getting them involved in the process and showing them the benefits of going to something new.