The Challenge

Lawn Manor Academy’s IT team made the wise decision to begin the journey to the cloud with the initial focus on email services.

• The IT team at Lawn Manor are experts within their field but had little experience with the cloud and were in need of a partner that would help support and guide them through the migration process;
• Needed to not interfere with day to day operations of the school especially considering the importance of the time of year being GCSE results day;
• Ensure that all devices including third party devices and services dependant on email were included within the migration and were configured on the new Office 365 service when the migration completed;
• They wanted more than just the assistance for the migration, they also wanted some training around how to administer the Office 365 environment;
• It was imperative that their internal environment was seamlessly but securely integrated with Office 365 to provide users with the ability to have a seamless experience (not having to remember multiple passwords).

The Solution

The solution for us was simple, Lawn Manor Academy were looking for an IT partner that would support them in the process of migrating their email services to Microsoft’s Office 365 platform.

For us we needed to clearly outline a plan and involve the Lawn Manor Academy IT team in as much as they felt comfortable with, as well as to ensuring we kept all users aware of what was going on. We did this in many forms, including a dedicated portal that was setup to clearly outline the process for users.

Our process consisted of five high level steps which included:

1. Plan – The planning stage enabled us to get a full understanding of what was being migrated and put in the necessary steps to ensure the migration was seamless.
2. Prepare – Once we have a good understanding of what needed to be migrated, we prepared the environment and the Office 365 platform.
3. Migrate – The migration process is key to project success and can take the longest to complete dependant on the data that needs to be migrated.
4. Go Live – This is where all the hard work paid off as we put all users on Microsoft’s Office 365 platform.
5. Post Support – Once we completed the Go Live phase we made sure the Lawn Manor Academy team were happy prior to us handing over the day to day responsibility.

The end result was great, we seamlessly migrated all users across to Microsoft’s Office 365 platform without any disturbance to the Lawn Manor Academy’s IT team as well as its users. We really hope to work with the Lawn Manor IT team again soon.

Testimonial

“As soon as we met the team from Our IT Services we knew we wanted to work with them. They provided an excellent service, from a clearly defined project plan right through successful implementation to post-implementation support. We will definitely use Our IT Services again.”