Migrating a business’s e-mail systems to the cloud can increase agility, uptime and security. These are some of the reasons Digicall South Africa decided to move its on-premises e-mail environment to a cloud-based solution.
Anticipating an extended migration time, Digicall turned to JEC Technologies, an IT managed service provider and Microsoft 365 specialist, to help speed up the process. And they did. By selecting the right partner, Digicall saved up to 20 months of potential migration time. Here is the case study…
The challenge
Digicall is a multinational group company specialising in business process management (BPM) services. As part of the local office’s migration plan, the company created new e-mail addresses in the cloud for each of its 316 users. When users started using these new mailboxes, they temporarily had:
1. The original on-premises mailbox, with their full e-mail history; and
2. Their new, primary, cloud mailbox with a new e-mail address.
For the migration to be finalised, the e-mail history from the 316 on-premises e-mail mailboxes needed to be moved to the new, cloud mailboxes with the new e-mail addresses. Digicall’s IT team could manually export these, but the process was labour-intensive, required users to be on site and offline during that time, and the projected timeline using this method was an estimated 20 months.
With two e-mail licences and mailboxes to maintain for each user, an extended migration like this could have rippled into other business operations. This was not an option for Digicall. They needed a much faster solution that would consolidate data, minimise effort, reduce costs and limit user impact.
The solution
It was at this point when Digicall contacted JEC Technologies (aka JEC Tech), an IT consulting firm, managed IT service provider, Microsoft Gold Partner and Direct MS Cloud Solutions Provider. Being an expert in Microsoft’s cloud solutions, JEC Tech was able to use its analysis of Digicall’s processes to create an automation script that leveraged existing tools and applications to optimise the speed and efficiency of Digicall’s migration.
By leveraging cloud technology and automation, the script pulled data from the original, on-premises mailboxes, uploaded it into a secure Azure Cloud storage space, consolidated the mailboxes, ensured no mail was lost or compromised and facilitated the automated licence change – all without impacting the user until the very end. At this point, a Digicall IT person only needed to phone the user to guide them on how to remove the on-premises mailbox connections in Outlook and ensure the user’s needs were met.
Johan Kriel, CIO at Digicall, adds: “Working smarter, not harder, has always been key to Digicall’s success. We make use of technology to create value; the value is, however, not in the technology exclusively, but in our people and partners that create unique solutions using various technologies.”
The impact
JEC Tech’s custom, cloud-based solution enabled Digicall to migrate 316 of its employees’ mailboxes in four months – 16.6% of the projected timeline. This saved Digicall time, potential licence fees, it reduced IT efforts and prevented any other knock-on costs that could have come from a longer migration time.
Need an IT partner that can save you time and costs migrating to the cloud? Contact JEC Tech to see how we can help.
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