Business Drivers: Exchange End of Support

Through summer 2020, Albert Goodman relied on Exchange Server 2010 to power communications at the firm. With the end-of-support deadline approaching in the fall, their IT team had two options: upgrade to Exchange Server 2019 or Office 365.

“We deemed it was more financially viable to go with Office 365 and move to the cloud, as it gave us additional collaborative ability through the Office suite,” said Matthew ffolliott-Powell, Head of IT at Albert Goodman. “At the time we were also using Office 2010, which needed to be upgraded, so this killed two birds with one stone for us.”

For this project, which featured 320 users including resource mailboxes, Matthew’s team evaluated several migration strategies before deciding on hybrid. This afforded them the benefit of a phased approach instead of a “big bang” move.

“The hybrid strategy put less pressure on the IT services team and gave us time to ensure all pre-requisites and checks had been put in place,” recalls Matthew. “We could also run test batches for groups of users. Once we were satisfied that the project had been completed successfully, we could choose to decommission our 2010 servers.”

Planning and Execution: A Collaborative Effort

Matthew and his network manager championed this migration along with an external consultant. BitTitan engaged during the pre-project planning phase to help guide migration strategy and identify which product would be the best fit.

After crafting an airtight migration plan in July, Matthew and his team configured their hybrid environment. Then they conducted pilot tests with batches of users during the month of August. The final cutover and finalization of remaining accounts took place during a single weekend in early September.

While Matthew’s team had some synchronization issues with a handful of corrupted mailboxes, overall the project went smoothly and the team was able to complete the migration successfully within their allotted project window.

Why MigrationWiz?

After evaluating other hybrid solutions and native capabilities from Microsoft, Matthew and the team were among the first customers of BitTitan to use the Hybrid Exchange Management features in MigrationWiz. This helped Albert Goodman limit the time and resources needed to perform this migration.

“As an IT manager, I’ve used MigrationWiz a number of times for previous projects, including the migration of two colleges with user counts in the thousands,” said Matthew. “MigrationWiz fit the bill for the value and the ease-of-use on this project. The primary cost savings was reduced hours required for the migration as well as reduced training requirements for our internal staff or external consultants.”

Matthew also appreciated the ability to monitor the progression of each batch during synchronization and finalization. With the collaborative effort and the right tool, the Albert Goodman team was able to complete this project on time and avoid disruption for employees. Post-migration work took place over the following two weeks, ensuring the organization was in the cloud and no longer reliant on the original infrastructure, which could then be decommissioned ahead of the impending end-of-support deadline.