Case Study – Exchange to Office 365 Migration

Executive Summary:
Local charity in Medford, OR was in IT support contract with national managed service provider that was over-charging them and not delivering the level of service they needed. They turned to Farmhouse Networking to help lower costs by migrating to the cloud. The first step in that process was to migrate from their aging Exchange 2013 server to Office 365 for Non-Profits:

• Setup non-profit relationship with Microsoft
• Create single-sign-on experience for the users
• Seamlessly migrate emails from on-premise to cloud
• Terminate lease on Exchange server after migration

Challenges:
Client had recently notified the former IT support company that they were in the process of migrating away from their leases and services. The former IT support company had not updated the Exchange Server in over two years. The former IT support company had not cleaned up stale records in their Active Directory, so there were numerous n0n-existent employees listed. The charity had only a small window for downtime both at the office and for their mobile workforce.

Solution:
Worked with the directory of the charity to validate their 501c3 status with Microsoft via Techsoup. Connected their local Active Directory to sync with new Azure Active Directory service for single-sign-on. Patched the Exchange server  to the latest release. Created a Hybrid connection to Office 365 to allow seamless transfer of all email data. Once in the cloud, severed the Hybrid connection to the Exchange server and powered down.

Results:
Customer was able to smoothly transition to the new Office 365 cloud-based email system thanks to our expert technician’s familiarity with both Exchange server and Office 365. They are able to interact with email from anywhere they travel without the worries of local internet or power outages. On-going support of their network has eased transition away from the over-priced and unresponsive provider to a highly responsive and affordably priced IT support company.