Enterprise Consolidation Success Story
To save money, streamline operations, and manage all systems under a single environment, APC Integrated consolidated technology infrastructures from a customer’s seven locations, along with remote workers for each, into a single M365 tenant. The trick was maintaining a seamless transition –no interruption to user accounts and mail, avoid impact to data access, and absolutely *not* take systems off-line for a period.
This was an office modernization project where on-premises Active Directory networks of differing domains with file servers plus multiple M365 tenants owned by the same company, all having vastly different configurations needing to be integrated. SharePoint sites, Exchange with Outlook mailboxes and groups, Teams teams, and account licenses had all been set-up and managed differently. APC Integrated aimed to improve managing all this but also to enhance collaboration among similar teams geographically separated while integrating functions for various concerns and departments allowing them to work jointly across the entire organization.
Expectation was the key, regardless of the technical challenges, APC recognized the importance of the customer’s employees understanding this mission and how offering key stakeholders a say in much of the integration to be accomplished would benefit everyone. In other words, key players involved, not simply upper management, were given an opportunity to contribute and weigh in on important decisions. Early in the process APC delivered documentation to management and team leads explaining details from the scope-of-work , and produced a video for employees of all locations to review, not simply explaining the process ahead, but showcasing advantages of resulting changes to occur. Walk-thru instructions were provided to help users with any change to workflows and/or where data was stored.
While this effort involved months of work, cut-overs were smooth, users retained access to systems and data throughout the timeline, and ultimately a significant monthly savings was realized through reconciling software licenses and reducing, sometimes eliminating, physical tech infrastructure. All work efforts became cloud-based, far more secure with enforced conditional access policies, and easier to onboard, offboard, and move staff laterally among locations.
Centralized management and constant monitoring for performance and security to the customer’s cloud environment was accomplished, while HelpDesk requests decreased immensely. Our customer was highly satisfied with the project’s outcome, especially the minimal disruption to daily operations.
This was a client success story which also made APC Integrated more successful. We continue to take the same approach every day with more clients and other projects regardless of scale.
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