Nussbaum Medien, a QualityHosting customer for more than five years, is a publishing group headquartered near Heidelberg, Germany. They produce print publications including local newspapers, journals, magazines, brochures, and specialty print products. The company has also successfully moved into digital channels for community news, events, guides, jobs, and online shopping publications.

In mid-2020, Nussbaum was ready to move from hosted Exchange to a Microsoft cloud environment. Some employees were already using Microsoft cloud applications, and Nussbaum’s IT team knew collaboration would be much easier if they migrated all off the company’s mailboxes to the cloud. However, they were concerned. How long would it take to complete the migration?

“When our partners at Nussbaum came to us with this question, they had in mind a time-consuming PST migration we’d done for them a few years earlier,” explained Sabrina Heiliger, Project Manager at QualityHosting. “We told them we had good news: We’d discovered MigrationWiz, which has helped us perform fast and seamless migrations for the past few years.”

Getting ahead of shadow IT

The team at Nussbaum not only recognized the significant opportunities that could be gained by moving to the cloud, they were also starting to see some renegade activity cropping up. As employees were sent home to work for the duration of the pandemic, they began to explore ways to maintain productivity and connections remotely. Some groups at Nussbaum started setting up Microsoft Teams on their own so they could be on the same page with customers who were requesting Teams meetings and collaboration.

“The Nussbaum IT team began to worry about shadow IT – their users setting up accounts that weren’t being administered centrally,” said Heiliger. “They wanted to take action before it got out of control.”

Consolidating all 1,000 users into one Microsoft 365 cloud tenant would allow Nussbaum IT to maintain security, manage Teams sprawl, and offer consistent application updates to all employees. Ultimately, the migration project involved email, archives, and calendars for 1,000 users – about 3.5TB of data.

Stunned by the Speed

Even though Nussbaum and Quality Hosting began strategizing about six months before the actual migration, the customer was surprised by how quickly it all happened.

“They couldn’t believe it when we told them this migration would go much faster than the one they did a few years ago, because they had so much more data,” said Heiliger. “The customer assumed we would have to inform users that some of their data wouldn’t be available on Monday morning when they logged back in. Well, Monday morning came and everything was done – they just had to reconfigure outlook profiles.”

The team had chosen a pre-stage migration in which data was moved in the background during the two weeks prior to cut-over using MigrationWiz. Nussbaum’s internal IT decided to configure Outlook at the end of the project themselves, but they could have used DeploymentPro, the automatic tool within MigrationWiz.

Not only was there significant time savings in the overall length of the migration project, Heiliger estimates that they saved 90% of the team’s time by using MigrationWiz rather than doing a manual PST migration.

“Since MigrationWiz is fully automated, I just needed to set it up then occasionally check the progress,” said Heiliger. “The tool even sends me emails showing the status, so I don’t have to do anything hands-on. MigrationWiz is smart and easy – and a huge time saver.”

Choosing fast, easy, and dependable

When the QualityHosting team initially went in search of an automated migration tool, they tried one that wasn’t MigrationWiz. Their experience left them frustrated and embarrassed. When the other tool indicated that the migration was 100% complete, they could see by comparing the Source and Destination that only 50% of the data had been migrated. That’s not the kind of performance that makes an IT service provider look good in the eyes of a customer.

Now, QualityHosting sticks with the tool they can rely on, says Heiliger: “Ever since we found BitTitan, we don’t even look at other tools because we know that if MigrationWiz says 100% complete, we can tell the customer the migration is a success.”