Worten, a retail distributor of appliances and consumer electronics, needed to decouple their cloud services from their holding company’s combined tenant. The Worten IT team was being tasked with setting up and managing a separate environment with Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and email. They asked Jose’s team at Bizdirect to guide them.

“We’ve found that unwinding a company from a shared tenant can be difficult, especially if they’re already invested in Microsoft services,” said Jose. “That is, it can be difficult if you’re not using MigrationWiz.”

Slowed – but not stopped – by Covid

These days, it seems every story has a Covid component. Bizdirect kicked off the project in January 2020 to migrate data for users in more than 3,000 users spread across 200 Worten offices and stores located in Spain and Portugal. As they began their planning and data gathering phases, the project was put on hold due to the start of the pandemic. The team lost about two months of project time and there was considerable uncertainty as to when they would be able to re-start.

Once everyone was settled into their home offices, they realized they needed to carry on since there was no end in sight for the lockdown. So the Worten project was brought back up to a boil. Fortunately, the Bizdirect team knew that closed offices and scattered employees didn’t have to hinder their progress. Every bit of the migration could be done remotely with a completely SaaS solution like MigrationWiz.

Migrating Microsoft Teams faster in parallel

Once they got back to work, the team was faced with a significantly shortened timeline. There was still pressure to stick close to the original schedule.

“Based on our previous experience, we had planned to migrate one team at a time. We estimated the migration could take up to two months. Fortunately, our BitTitan account manager told us about new enhancements they’d just introduced for Microsoft Teams migrations. After completing one test with Worten Spain, we were able to group teams and complete the rest of the migrations in about two weeks,” said Jose.

With those new updates to MigrationWiz, Bizdirect successfully migrated over 1,000 Teams and 500 GB of data across those 3,000 users.

Every project is a chance to learn

When asked about their take-aways from the Worten project, the Bizdirect team at first lamented the loss of time when the project was put on hold at the start of the pandemic.

“In retrospect, the two months could have been used for planning and data collection,” said Jose. “The main goal of the migration was to unwind one company from several others, so the biggest challenge was making sure we knew which data truly belonged to Worten.”

Fortunately, they could rely on MigrationWiz for efficiency and remote deployment when things got back on track.

BitTitan shares best practices

Another learning was the importance of a clear, cohesive communication strategy to end users. Worten elected to perform a “quick switch”, where users and their most recent data are cutover to the destination, allowing for employees to be up and running on day one; however, older data will then need to be migrated in subsequent passes. A good end-user communication strategy, along with deliberate planning, helps set expectations and mitigate the fact that older information will only be available after the cutover.

Even with a tool as easy to use as MigrationWiz, a partner like Bizdirect adds considerable value during a complex migration that requires untangling one company from others. They were able to bring their technical and planning expertise to the project as well as their ongoing relationship with the BitTitan Customer Success team.