WE MAKE MIGRATING TO OFFICE 365 EASY AND RISK-FREE.

Case Study – Exchange Online

Litescape Eastman, local firm headquartered in New York City, specializes in financial consulting services with around 350 employees across the globe. Working in different time zones, their employees work on-field as well as off-field and catapulted the company to a strong growth trajectory. As they grew, the existing email solution required more maintenance and loads of other challenges threatened to slow the growth. At the same time, they wanted to diversify and offer new services.

To reduce costs and to eliminate the risks of downtimes and loss of productivity they decided to move to Exchange Online offering. Unlike Microsoft, migrations offered by Apps4Rent has 24/7 end-user support as a part of the service.

Keeping email solution online 24/7 had started becoming a daunting task. Essential services like ability to sync with mobile devices, mail client connectivity from desktops became very critical. Moreover, they had to regularly keep compliance and licensing audits all the time. The continuous audits became challenging and distracted the attention of the internal IT team from their core competencies.

Keeping compliance in mind, they needed trusted and robust hardware devices. This increased the costs significantly for the business owners. Besides, the upfront licensing costs added to the bad taste.

“Working with users or IT team members from different continents and time zones was challenging. At times, they would wait for our office to open or would raise a ticket for my team here in New York for e-mail issues. This would mean loss of productivity for that user. Many times, it would be the VPN solution to connect for mails as we had to adhere to compliance all the time. This would mean the entire location had issues. Keeping experts for such issues was big headache,” said Allen McCoy, IT Director for Litescape Eastman.

This was the time, they had to move to a more robust and alive network. Keeping e-mail servers inhouse was no longer feasible.

With the requirement and previous aspects in mind, the company started the due diligence of migrating to the cloud. They investigated and looked around.

“Many cloud solutions looked the same-or at least claimed that they had the same feature sets. But when we looked under the hood the differences were astonishing. We could clearly see why Organizations and large enterprises preferred Office 365 over other solutions. Besides our ability to use our Exchange licenses was an eye-opener and changed the game. At least, we don’t have to convince our business owners on this” said Mike McIntyre, head of the IT team from New York.

Microsoft Exchange Online was the perfect fit. This would also allow them to meet all the compliances and pave way for adopting future Office 365 solutions including collaboration and feature like Skype for Business. The biggest challenge they faced was migrating the data and providing support to the users. Microsoft through various programs offers migration assistance. However, that is not the only thing we needed. Somewhere on the Microsoft site, they learned about Apps4Rent as a CSP with migration services included along with 24/7 support via phone, chat, and email.

“Litescape Eastman and Apps4Rent had worked together in the past-in first decade of 2000’s. We had provided SharePoint services along with 24/7 end-user support via phone, chat, and email. They were impressed with the support and services in the past,” said Wade Dube, Manager at Apps4Rent.

“The choice was clear. Apps4Rent well-known for its migration and support services along with the dependency of Microsoft. That was unbeatable. We have worked with Apps4Rent in the past and know they give utmost attention to detail to even tiniest of things. They have always tried to add value to whatever they provide. I don’t remember any of our users complaining about the end user support they provided.”

Apps4Rent and Mike from Litescape Eastman worked closely to and came up with a detailed migration plan. They looked at several factors- data size; user availability; how important the user was; devices user used; ideal date and time to move the user; kind of mail clients used and host of other questions. Armed with all this information – Apps4Rent proposed a detailed migration plan. This was to be carried out in phased manner.

The type of migration that we chose was “cutover migration” as we were improving our requirements on-premise. Once the email addresses are provided, Apps4Rent team will create the mailboxes on Office 365.

There are a few things you should inform Apps4Rent that will help us make your migration as accurate and precise. We want your new mailbox to work the same way without any problems, retaining all the settings of your old system.

Here are a few ‘ifs’ you need to consider:

• If your email address has any associated aliases, get it from your service provider and provide it to us. We will create it on Office 365 as well.
• If you have list of email addresses that are configured to forward to any other email IDs, kindly let us know.
• If your email addresses are a part of any email group or distribution list, then you must provide the list to Apps4Rent.

Passwords are required to cross verify the data post migration. Autodiscover record must be pointed to the existing email server to create the migration batch. Migration batch will be initiated with a specific email address that has full access permission on all mailboxes in organization. Assign proper permissions to avoid migration failures.

In order to add your domain in the Office 365, you need to create a TXT record in the domain registrar control panel. Only after successful verification, we can add this domain and create mailboxes. Also, Apps4Rent would require access to change MX record and other DNS records like SPF, CNAME etc.

The migration process is smooth if Apps4Rent understands your systems. If you think Apps4Rent experts should know any technicalities that will help migrations, kindly inform our dedicated experts.

Migration would be seamless with no downtime to user along with zero data loss. As users get migrated, they would setup the devices they use to access Exchange online via Microsoft Office 365 platforms. Setting up devices was easy. Our support team is also equipped to help users configure PCs/Laptops and various handheld devices.

All this was done without any extra costs to the company. Apart from the best pricing in the industry, we have also provided our support and migration services. This is what sets us apart from our competition out there. We do not have any data loss or downtimes during migration. If you have any issue, our dedicated support is always available 24/7 via phone, chat, and email to answer your migration-related questions.

Business owners are now happy as with no downtime there is no business impact. Plus, they save valuable dollars with predictable monthly costs. They no longer need to spend on trustworthy, robust and expensive hardware.

“We are no longer investing in hardware. We invest in people which is fueling our growth. Apps4Rents 24/7 end user support has freed our Internal IT team. Now, they focus on core business than managing end users. All this with no expensive hardware. The costs are predictability. I think we got a deal here with combination of Apps4Rent services along with Microsoft’s reliability,”

IT team is happy as they are no longer stretched. They do not provide mail support or end user support for mail services. Right from provisioning of users to setting them up and helping them with the questions from time to time is all done by Apps4Rent. “We were surprised by the results during migration. All users were migrated with zero data loss; zero data loss and zero headache. Apps4Rents migration and support team did everything-right from migrating data to setting up the user. My faith in Apps4Rent increased manifold with the results. We work on our core expertise and they work on theirs.” We couldn’t be happier.