Office 365 Migration

Our IT Department recently completed an Office 365 Migration project for a Nonprofit organization. Our responsibility was to replace the client’s antiquated Exchange and file servers with a more efficient cost-effective email and document management solution. When conducting an IT Network Infrastructure audit, we quickly realized that the client’s network was suffering from many issues:

• Cloud domain connection to on premise directories
• Licensing
• Mailbox syncing local
• Direct Connection to Office 365 across multiple sites
• Roll out scheduling
• User Experience/Training

These ongoing issues were clearly having an impact on productivity and communication with staff becoming frustrated by daily distractions from more important tasks. The client also had to face financial setbacks due to ongoing issues which were a result of lost emails and send and receive errors.

The Solution

Our IT Department proposed that the best solution for the client was to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium. We recommended Office 365 because of the following reasons:

• Everybody started using the same version of Outlook and Office applications within Office 365, removing any compatibility issues and making support and training easier.
• Company employees can access email, contacts, documents, and the company intranet from anywhere and on any device using any browser.
• The external teams can benefit from using the same email and document management platforms that can be accessed anywhere from the cloud, allowing them to share and collaborate on documents as if they were working in the office.
• Office 365 was a highly scalable solution that allows the IT Manager to provision accounts for new employees quickly and efficiently, while controlling costs.
• An uptime guarantee in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) provides greater reliability without the expense of added capital investments such as server, backup power, storage areas, etc.
• Improved security results from the compliance-certified physical security Microsoft deploys in its data centers in addition to encryption technologies, backup and redundancy, data protection agreements, and more.

Once the nonprofit organization committed to the project, our team worked closely with their management team to ensure that everyone was on-board and kept up to date at every stage of the migration process. We provided a ‘Statement of Work’ that defines the scope of the work involved to complete the Office 365 migration project. This document contains details such as all deliverables and milestones, the tasks that lead to the deliverables, the resources needed to complete the project and a breakdown of costs and deadlines. Before the Office 365 migration project was completed, our Technical Account Manager also ran a number of Office 365 workshops with the existing staff members so they could become familiar with the Office 365 interface, its features and functionality. We were successfully able to perform migration of more that 300 users and over 500 resource mailboxes (calendars, shared mailboxes/calendars, global contacts, and public folders) to Office 365 from on premise servers.

Success Deliverable

The Nonprofit organization decided to utilize Microsoft Office 365 off-premise services to generate better user connection experience and reduce server operations costs. Additionally, the organization migrated Lync to Skype for Business and added the OneDrive feature for all users during the migration. The client is now researching and assessing potential implementation of additional Office products such as Microsoft SharePoint, Teams and Planner.

Impact: The entire organization

OFFICE 365 ADDED VALUE TO OUR CLIENTS BUSINESS

All staff email accounts, calendars and public folders have been consolidated into a single platform.

• Everyone uses the same version of Office, which is automatically updated to the latest version in the cloud.
• We have helped the client to embrace Microsoft applications that are included with their Office 365 subscription, including Skype for Business.
• The IT Manager now has more time to concentrate on other tasks because of the advanced administration capabilities* included in Office 365.
• Mobility: Mobility has been improved with an ease to access from data from phones, iPads and laptops wherever the staff uses it.
• The company now has an effective online backup solution in place for their emails and documents which are all stored in the cloud and backed up regularly by Microsoft.
• The fully featured management console lets you customize and administrate just about everything in Office 365 and is no different from deploying software on-premises.