This organisation is a Not For Profit organisation that delivers a range of crisis and early intervention accommodation and support services to women, children and young people, and families who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness and/or domestic and family violence. This organisation has been operating for 40 years, and we’ve been helping them with their IT requirements since early 2015.
The situation
The organisation was experiencing a number of problems with an aging email server, including limited email storage space and frequent crashing causing downtime. It was identified that this was an issue that was causing disruption across the entire organisation.
The target
The organisation requires reliable email systems in place. Email is considered a critical business infrastructure for the organisation, as many internal business processes cease to function without email.
The action
Research into options was done, and two high level options were discussed with the organisation. Buying and configuring a newer server with more capacity, or migrating email to the cloud. It was decided to migrate email to the cloud, as Microsoft provides cloud hosted email (utilising Office 365) to Not for Profits for free.
The migration project was planned out and finalised over a one month period. The pre-migration was set to run for about two weeks, and the cutover was performed on a weekend successfully, with relatively minor teething issues come the following Monday.
The result
Since migrating email to Microsoft’s Cloud Hosted Office365, email has not been a concern whatsoever for the organisation. Each staff member has a 50 GB mailbox, and can access their email from anywhere, from any device and they only need to remember their email address and password.
In addition to the reliability of migrating to Office365, the organisation no longer needs to pay for any maintenance of an exchange server, saving them at least 10 hours of support per year.