CASE STUDY
Our client, one of the largest unitary authorities in England, was formed by merging five councils with vastly different IT ecosystems.
The newly formed authority faced significant technology challenges, including consolidating thousands of users across multiple Microsoft 365 (M365) workloads and Active Directory domains within a strict one-year deadline. The complexity was heightened by the need to maintain data integrity and provide a seamless experience for staff, many of whom were working remotely.
The council sought help to efficiently and securely migrate their diverse IT environments, aiming to improve efficiency, security and productivity. They needed an experienced partner with a comprehensive and proven delivery approach and effective migration tool that could handle the breadth of their requirements, from Teams and SharePoint to Exchange and OneDrive, without exceeding their budget.
To achieve their aims, the council turned to Advania’s tenant consolidation project, supported by partner Quest, to provide the necessary functionality and expertise to successfully complete the project on time.
Services
Professional Services
Cloud migration
Licensing
Industry
Public sector – local government
Organisation size
3,500+
Completion Date
October 2022
The client faced several significant challenges during their IT consolidation project:
Throughout, the council required an experienced partner who could not only oversee each aspect of the migration but could execute every step of the plan without disruption to business-as-usual activities.
These challenges highlighted the need for a robust, efficient, and secure migration solution that could handle the diverse and extensive requirements of the project.
To address these challenges, Advania delivered a comprehensive migration solution that addressed each aspect of the council’s need.
The entire migration was executed remotely, to satisfy the constraints imposed by the pandemic, and the SaaS-based Quest solution allowed for migrations to be performed without requiring physical access to devices.
Our migration team conducted thorough discovery and planning phases to ensure a smooth transition, with jobs scheduled to start on Thursday evenings and be completed by Monday mornings to minimise disruption to staff.
We focused on maintaining data integrity and providing a seamless experience for users, minimising disruption. This included preserving user profiles, application settings and access methods ensuring that staff could continue their work in a familiar and uninterrupted fashion. Additionally, to address the complexity of migrating Teams chats, we used a feature in the Quest solution that consolidated one-to-one chats into a single archive. This approach significantly reduced migration time while ensuring important content was retained.
We partnered with Quest and utilised their market-leading migration solution which provided the necessary breadth of functionality to handle the diverse IT environments. This included migrating Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive and Active Directory
Finally, by partnering with the Council’s internal IT team, we ensured that our experts supported and guided the client through each stage of the project. This collaboration, achieved through building trust and understanding, was crucial for the successful and timely completion of the migration.
By leveraging Advania’s proven migration methodology and collaborating with a trusted migration tool vendor together with the client’s team, we successfully consolidated the council’s IT environments within the one-year deadline.
The client now benefits from significant improvements in efficiency, security and productivity across its unified tenant. By consolidating five diverse IT ecosystems into a single, unified environment, the council was able to streamline operations and enhance user experience with the successful merger of 7,000 user accounts from five disparate councils into a single M365 environment.
Advania’s solution – resulting in a seamless user experience as standard – was not only comprehensive but also cost-effective, demonstrating an efficient use of public funds to support a public body.
By empowering collaboration, boosting information flow across the organisation and empowering staff with faster and more reliable access to the resources they need, Advania not only modernised internal communications for the client’s thousands of employees but laid the foundation for a more connected, informed and responsive local authority, directly impacting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the UK.
Head of IT
Local Authority
Take a look at some of the results that stood out for Forum.
user accounts merged from five separate councils into a single Microsoft 365 environment
Teams chats migrated efficiently using Quest's chat consolidation feature
months to complete a complex and wide-ranging migration
Whether you’re facing similar challenges to peers across your industry, or you have a unique need for something different – speak to us to find out what we can do.
