Smooth, No-hassle Migrations

IT migrations are always stressful. You worry about disruptions to your business, lost data, frustrated employees. So why do it? Putting everything in one place increases productivity and interoperability while reducing administration, complexity, security issues (risk!) and support challenges.

With the right partner and careful planning, even the most complex migration can be successful. Wellington Street Consulting has migrated more than 50,000 seats to Office 365, while also streamlining business processes and increase security standards. And we’ve done that in compliance-sensitive environments, where HIPAA and PCI standards had to be maintained throughout the process.

A carefully thought-out, well-planned and designed migration — even something extreme, like moving from desktops to a cloud-based network — can be done seamlessly, with little or no downtime and relatively little disruption.

WSC “came in and not only migrated our email and upgraded our technology but … also watched us at work and strategically suggested changes and improvements to how we work. Without a major disruption to the business. Incredible!”

Bobbie Carlton of Carlton PR and Marketing.

WSC starts with its proprietary, in-depth discovery process. We’ll focus on why you’re migrating, and what you hope to achieve from the process. That way we can design a process that ensures your system can deliver We’ll tell you upfront what capabilities and limitations of your completed migration will be.

Planning and preparation are critical. For example: How many third-party systems integrate into your current systems? What needs to be done to ensure that they’ll still work, without a loss of functionality or data, once the migration is complete? Those concerns should be addressed before you migrate, not when it’s too late.

Finally, there’s testing; test early; test often. Once the migration is structured, WSC will run a pilot program to test all elements of the migration before rolling it out to the entire company. That ensures a minimum of downtime and headaches are encountered when the new system goes live.

Custom migrations

A recent WSC client project involved re-configuring multiple Exchange And Active Directory objects at once, converting a user mailbox to a shared mailbox, creating a distribution list with the email address that was assigned to the original user, and creating a brand-new user account and adding it to the same distribution list. Due to the tight relationship these objects had to one another, these changes all had to be perfectly timed and happen in a very specific order.

Why did we do that? It was the only way to meet the client’s specific goals.  There’s no migration tool on the market today that can process migrations in such detail.  So WSC built a custom migration tool to do just that.  SharePoint hosted the front end where the client can update records as needed, flag records for the next wave, and track progress and results.  The back-end employs a series of custom PowerShell scripts that not only pull in the required data from the SharePoint dashboard and verifies everything needed for the change is available, including licenses. It performs the changes and logs the results in the corresponding SharePoint record.  It’s not your run-of-the-mill migration.  But for WSC, that’s not a problem.  

When the migration is complete, WSC will take one more pass, this time with a questionnaire and a round of one-on-one interviews designed to identify flaws in the systems and issues that need to be addressed to ensure that the migration is completed smoothly and is functioning properly and efficiently.

More than mail…

WSC migrations aren’t limited to email components. We also migration and consolidation files from multiple sources into Teams, SharePoint or OneDrive, which is appropriate. Not sure sure which one is appropriate? We can help architect a solution for that too. 🙂

A Seamless Two-Stage Migration

CPRM is a true 21st century company: lots of specialists on contract, lots of small clients. That meant files in dozens of formats stored in dozens of places — a nightmare when it was time to collaborate and share. WSC consolidated CPRM’s client files in one cloud-based SharePoint site, then architected a Microsoft Teams environment so client teams can collaborate on a variety of project files and media, no matter the source or ultimate destination. READ FULL CASE STUDY HERE