“It’s critical from a day-to-day perspective, being able to share data and work together as colleagues of one organisation,” said Tom Bowlby, Head of IT & Facilities at Breast Cancer Now. “After a merger happens, you’re trying to move away from a culture of ‘us and them’ and the technical things we do behind the scenes like this work toward that end goal.”
Tom and Senior IT Manager Brigid Macdonald broke the project down into two phases: first, they needed to move both London-based organisations into the same space, set up trust relationships with Active Directories and telephony, and prepare the target Office 365 tenant. The second phase was the actual consolidation of users and data into one tenant. For this, they turned to Nero Blanco IT and BitTitan®.
Migrating Together with Nero Blanco IT and BitTitan
With the Breast Cancer Now team completing phase one work, the IT migration specialists from Nero Blanco turned to phase two: the migration of 250 user mailboxes and OneDrive accounts, as well as shared mailboxes, archives, and data in SharePoint and Teams. As a close partner of BitTitan, Nero Blanco got the necessary information from the team at Breast Cancer Now and began mapping the project within MigrationWiz®.
For this project, Nero Blanco used a pre-stage approach. In August, Nero Blanco began migrating user mailboxes and data in the background in preparation for a late September cutover. With the majority of data already migrated, Nero Blanco was able to cut over all users within a single weekend and move the combined organizations into a single Office 365 tenant with high fidelity and minimal escalations post-project.
The Right Team for the Job
Breast Cancer Now was connected to Nero Blanco through a BitTitan employee and frequent supporter of the charity after the merger was announced. For Breast Cancer Now, it was the expertise and specialization in this type of project that convinced them to engage with Nero Blanco.
“We work with many partners, but the ultimate decision came down to the fact that this was bread-and-butter for Nero Blanco,” said Macdonald.