The Neill Corporation and The Salon People merged their companies. They decided to partner with Bit-Wizards to help successfully migrate their 900+ users to the cloud. They needed a centralized way to manage their e-mail across both companies and preferred to be able to use shared calendars company-wide.
Neill TSP is a collaboration of two companies. The collaboration owns and operates a network of Aveda Hair Institutes. We also own and operate a grouping of salons, Paris Parker hair salons, which is primarily in the Louisiana area. When the collaboration came about, one of the, big issues and challenges that we had was the inability. It was extremely difficult for us to communicate and collaborate across domains. So we had two separate companies coming together and operating as one, but we were still running on separate and distinct technology platforms. We're at a crossroad with technology as it pertains to email, calendaring. That's where it started. Neill TSP came to Bit-Wizards when they were looking to plan out their adoption for the cloud. We worked with Neill TSP to provide them with a road map and a strategy for adopting the cloud that would be quick. They needed a unified email system and they needed to be able to launch it without having to wait around for a server to deploy or adding another server that they had to maintain. So it was important to them to include all of those different variables to their project, and Office365 was an easy pick. This, project that was two companies merging together that had email across four dissimilar systems and nineteen different domains with over nine hundred users, spread across all four of those email systems. So consolidating that into one system with Office365 posed its own challenge. We were able to migrate Neill TSP in a little under a month. That includes end user notifications and training. It was that simple. To the end user, they flipped a switch overnight, and they were moved to Office365. One of the biggest benefits that come out of it was probably Lync. Lync quickly became a big tool for us. It was kind of a surprise. It it was one of those game changer things in our company. It became very clear that this was a tool that, you know, we could use every day. We went from, little communication to where it was very frustrating to do, to communicating every day on a very easy way. You know, we have more conversations today than we did over a year ago. So those cloud tools, since they're not limited to a certain location, really brings us all together. The next phase in the relationship with Neill TSP, after the migration to Exchange and their adoption of link online is to focus on SharePoint for document management. It's really the matter of taking the solution and customizing it for each business unit that they have. Going through business by business unit, business process by business process, and building out that workflow. And, we continue to move forward. We continue to plan and strategize and build roadmap for other Microsoft cloud technologies. When we made the decision to to to engage Bit-Wizards in our Office365, implementation, that was a decision that we did not take lightly. I mean, we were looking for a company that had the expertise, the technical expertise, but also had the understanding of how to manage and deliver very complex technical projects. And we've got that feeling of, you know, these guys are really understand our situation. They really care about getting us where we wanna go. And I think that Bit-Wizards delivered on that.
The Challenge
One of the main challenges for Neill-TSP migration was that their 900+ email users were spread across four different email servers, across 19 domains. The email servers consisted of Exchange, CommuniGate, Hosted IMAP, &ted POP. Bit-Wizards and Neill-TSP decided to utilize the Microsoft FastTrack program to get their users migrated as fast as possible.
The Solution
Office 365 Engineers at Bit-Wizards helped Neill-TSP choose between the different Office 365 models that would best fit the needs of their newly merged company. The best option for Neil-TSP considering time and financial commitment was the Cloud Identity model. The cloud identity model simplified the migration and kept the project on target for completion. During the process of mailbox organization and clean-up, Bit-Wizards was able to help Neill-TSP identify potential issues that ultimately led to a more efficient migration.
The Result
The easily identifiable result of this migration to the cloud is that the IT team at Neill-TSP now has a centralized place to manage all their mailboxes across the entire organization. Also since the migration, Neill-TSP users can easily communicate across the various business units. Unlike before the migration to Office 365, they can look up email addresses, see shared calendars and quickly use the Microsoft Lync tool to quickly create online meetings to facilitate training and efficient communication across the organization.
The Anti-spam functionality of Office 365 has filtered almost 70,000 messages for the company in just under two months. On top of the increase in efficiency, Neill-TSP was able to eliminate all costs associated with Rackspace, GoDaddy, CommuniGate, and Exchange 2007 for their email hosting needs.
