Case Study

Local Email Exchange migration to Office 365

January 2017

– about our customer

This non-profit organization established by the Maryland General Assembly in 1985. Its mission is to support restoration and environmental education efforts that improve the health of the watershed and natural resources. The organization makes millions of dollars in grants per year. The organization receives no public tax dollars. It is funded primarily through sales of commemorative license plates, voluntary donations to the Endangered Species Fund, and partnerships with other fund-raisers and foundations. The organization has repeatedly received four stars (the highest possible rating) from Charity Navigator, an independent charity evaluator.

Business Requirement

The client was using an on-premise exchange and had concerns about its security, cost and availability. The client had reported about tons of spam emails, multiple license purchase for different solution causing an increase in cost, hardware issues causing loss of productive work hours and also it requires physical intervention for those little hardware issues. Overall on-premise exchange was requiring an increased amount of management. Our analysis showed it wasn’t cost effective to refresh their local server hardware and buy all new Microsoft Exchange and Office licenses.

Our Solution

Pledge Tech Team, after discussions with the client, suggested them to opt for cloud-based solution and migrate the on-premise exchange to Office 365 with exchange online feature. This is best service available in the market nowadays and it is all they required for going forward with security, accessibility and up to date technology.

We planned the migration with least downtime by creating link between local exchange and Office 365 which synchronized all the emails and settings hence user’s emails were already available via new outlook web access. Users were well informed about the process and were trained on O365 outlook before moving forward, this way we decrease the dependency on the local server so that the migration would be as smooth as possible.

The O365 account also took care of the licensing issue and it includes desktop version of all the latest office products that can be installed on up to 5 devices per user. This feature came very handy as earlier they were using older office version and after the migration, we moved them on latest office 2016. Even the license management become very easy as we can remove any license if any employee leaves the organization which can be re-assign to new user

Benefits of the Solution

A highly available email service never affected by internal resources.

Accessibility from anywhere on the planet.

A much faster processing time than its old servers.

Upgraded latest Office products for multiple devices.

An agile infrastructure that can grow easily with the business.

Lower service and maintenance costs.

Reallocated IT time/budget to more effective use.

Conclusion

The ultimate goal of the project was to provide the company with a reliable, agile, highly available and efficient email service. Once the migration was completed, users could see that Office 365 was perfectly aligned with their real needs.