CASE STUDY: A Boston Based Financial Services company with 35 users and offices in North Carolina, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota needed to migrate from Microsoft Business Online Productivity Suite (BPOS) to Office 365.

Case Study Initial Diagnosis and Environment:  Client has 35 Windows 7 and Vista pc’s that pass all requirements for upgrading from BPOS to Office 365. An initial network assessment was performed and no migration issues were found. The client has 5 locations spread out over 5 different geographic areas throughout the country.

Challenges: To initiate the migration, Microsoft had to be involved. The previous IT Support vendor was let go, but they had already set a scheduled migration date. One of the main challenges was that Microsoft incorrectly initiated their part of the migration ahead of schedule, causing delays in implementation. Onsite Service Engineers had to be rescheduled and sent onsite early, and senior staff on the client’s side had to be kept informed of project progress. Because the Client has a very high amount of sales staff that operate on deadlines, this put additional pressure on ALL IT Supported to complete the project quickly.  Additionally, because the branch offices were in separate  geographic areas, each office had to have a separate engineer assigned during a specific time. Lastly, because there was only 1 lead Remote Support Engineer, if there were any problems at a location, the onsite service engineer had to wait until the Remote Support Engineer was free to report the problem and wait his place in line. Despite all requests for updates being routed through a designated point of contact with the client, and through the Service Manager at the All IT Supported side, stress on the client side was extremely high and staff members were getting very frustrated.

Solutions:

All IT Supported assigned 5 onsite service engineers, 1 to each location to provide tier 1 support to the client. The entire project had a designed Service Manager, and a leading level 2 Remote Support Engineer that kept in contact with Microsoft and worked to resolve glitches at each location. At one location, a pc that was diagnosed with last minute glitches was removed and taken offline and replaced with a spare.  During the migration, a Service Manager reported updates to the designated point of contact at the Client, and discussed and adjusted the timeline with the level 2 Remote Support Engineer. Dispatch Coordinators routed onsite service engineers and updated the Service Manager on arrival/departure times. The onsite service engineers provided on-the-ground support, and followed all instructions to smoothly migration the Microsoft BPOS system to Office 365. The migration was completely over the course of a weekend, and resulted in only 4 hours of total email downtime during the regular work week.