Many Regions, Many Offices, Many Archives: A Microsoft Office 365 Migration Story

This property and infrastructure company with locations in over 40 countries across the globe, manages financing and development of significant sites for both the private and public sector.

A series of mergers and acquisitions had seen the company grow dramatically over time and resulted in a complex web of segregated data and systems.

With tens of thousands of emails passing through multiple servers daily, email management was unnecessarily complex and unwieldy. Six different email platforms were in use across the organisation in a variety of different region-specific versions and flavours, managed from multiple locations.

To introduce global consistency of end-user email experience and to bring order to the company’s email management sprawl, the company wanted to complete a streamlined, multi-part migration in the shortest time possible. The challenge was amplified by operations dispersed across three key territories: Asia Pacific, the Americas and Europe.

The company’s US-based global IT team – who had central oversight and management of the project – sought an IT provider who could help achieve this global consolidation efficiently, without negatively impacting email users during transition. Insentra was selected over alternatives because it clearly articulated how to resolve the problem in a straightforward and risk-free manner. Using Insentra’s five-stage methodology, the proposal outlined a rigorous approach that would achieve the client’s desired outcome in the shortest available time, with an end-to-end solution from planning through to post-migration support.

The end result was a unified global archive environment across all three regions, able to be centrally managed from the Americas, and successfully achieved within the client’s desired timelines. There is nothing unique about each of these regional migrations when considered in isolation. It is the accumulated challenge of consolidating such a diverse set of platforms in concurrent projects, across multiple regions and with different requirements, that makes this an interesting case study.

Key insights and outcomes from this highly successful global project:

» Office 365 was the obvious choice to consolidate from multiple environments.

» Fully-supported platform to replace end-of-life systems

» Powerful inbuilt Exchange Online Archive capability

» Provides powerful collaboration features to support company growth.

» Move to a single integrated productivity platform enables central management through a unified management interface – In this case the all regions are now managed by the global IT team in the USA

» Unified systems deliver licensing efficiency – This global project simplified a previously complex licensing structure by eliminating a number of vendor solutions

» Total Cost of Ownership savings can be significant – This project decommissioned significant infrastructure including 40 servers, 300 TB of storage and legacy tools

» Tailored solutions and the right partner can make the difference – This global project was a true partnership between Insentra and the company’s IT team. That collaboration enabled careful alignment of regional approaches to meet regional needs… and it enabled a highly successful project that has left the client delighted and end-users more productive.

This company is enjoying the fruits of a successful global consolidation and the unified user experience of a productivity platform poised to support future growth.