The Scenario: Supporting Consolidation of Large Government Agencies

In 2019, the Unisys team was approached by a government agency in Asia-Pacific to assist with an Office 365 tenant migration. Within this entity were several smaller agencies, most of whom maintained their own instance of Office 365 or other email collaboration platforms. The objective was to consolidate these tenants into a single, central tenant. This effort, which included a change to the domain names of each tenant, consisted of 6,000 user mailboxes, 1,000 shared mailboxes, and more than 40 terabytes of OneDrive data.

“This client, which we had been working with since 2016, had several bespoke collaboration platforms within separate agencies that were running on shadow IT, so it was important to move to a central service model around a single O365 tenant,” said Paul La, Solution Consultant at Unisys. “For this project, we handled most of the data migration itself and our people were deeply embedded with their core IT team to make sure the project went smoothly.”

Success with the Pre-Stage Approach and MigrationWiz

Unisys advised a pre-stage migration strategy for this project, where the majority of user data was to be migrated over weeks or months prior to the final cutover, limiting the potential for end-user downtime.

With MigrationWiz, Unisys was able to migrate mailbox data in the background over the course of three months, while the 40TB of OneDrive data was completed over six months. For a project of this size – and with this many tenants – the Unisys team found ease-of-use to be a key benefit of partnering with BitTitan.

“The tool was really convenient to use, especially when having to deal with different domain addresses during the transfer. We were able to run 15 projects at the same time, and because of the pre-stage approach, the final cutover took only three days,” said Paul.

Paul also points to two other components of MigrationWiz that made the project a success: the BitTitan SDK and DeploymentPro. The BitTitan Technical Sales team provided PowerShell scripts to Unisys that helped manage certain aspects of this project, while DeploymentPro automatically configured Outlook profiles, saving the Unisys team from having to go from workspace to workspace after the final cutover. Unisys was able to migrate users and data faster between email platforms which minimized downtime and loss of data experienced by the client’s end users, resulting in uninterrupted continued productivity and a greater end user experience throughout the transition.

With MigrationWiz, the Unisys team was able to deliver this project on-time with few complaints from end-users and full data fidelity.

After careful planning and configuration, which included test accounts to simulate the Exchange and OneDrive migrations, the combined team was ready to move.

Looking Ahead: Delivering Value for New Agencies

For Unisys, this project represented an opportunity to grow their relationship and services practice with the client.

“With our expertise and background in digital workplace services, Unisys is in a unique position to deliver specialised migration projects for government-sensitive situations,” said Paul. “Prior to this migration, many of the agencies used legacy collaboration platforms or different Microsoft 365 tenants which created friction within the different agencies and unnecessary co-existent complexities within the environment. . By successfully completing this migration, we were able to  move our client to a modern standardized collaboration platform across the organisation, consolidate these new users, and grow our serviceable base to better support the workplace productivity and collaboration needs of our client.”