Langstaff Ellis is a supplier of bespoke joinery, designing and building beautiful bespoke fitted furniture for rooms such as kitchens, and dressing rooms. A sister business, Cutlist provides a wood-based pre-cut panel service for joiners and developers. Both businesses are part of Hem Group Holdings.
The two businesses had been sharing physical and IT space for a number of years. Due to business expansion, the decision was taken to separate out the IT infrastructure for the two organisations so that they could be run and managed separately.
This created a need to migrate the business data, domains, users and their mailboxes from the existing shared O365 tenant to a new one for Cutlist.
As a forward-thinking business leader, Managing Director, Ed Birks had been running a cloud infrastructure based on Office354, Sharepoint and Azure for around 10 years.
This foresight and investment had already come into its own during the Covid-19 pandemic, as it allowed the business to continue working as usual, without any major disruption.
Although there was some good IT knowledge in-house, it was decided that some external expertise would be essential for this project. Langstaff Ellis had been working with Microsoft Gold Partner, Compete366 to supply O365 for a number of years, so it made sense for them to use Compete366 to provide the additional expertise required for this project.
As Ed explains “I used to work in network development so there’s a lot of the IT work that I can do myself but not working in the industry for some time means that there are some things that are outside of my knowledge so their assistance has been invaluable.”
It might be reasonable to assume that as both Langstaff-Ellis and Cutlist were on the same platform – i.e. O365 – that Microsoft could just flick a switch in the background and everything would be migrated. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Migrating from one O365 tenant to another is a complete migration project in the same way as migrating domains, users, mailboxes and file content from on-premise systems to O365.
In order to separate CutList from the Langstaff-Ellis domain, Compete366 created a new site and migrated all data and mailboxes across, before switching over to the new domain.
Compete366 worked on the set-up of the new tenant and migrated the CutList domain, users and mailboxes from the Langstaff tenant into the new CutList tenant – leaving the Langstaff users and domain behind in the original tenant. Compete366 also provided the O365 licenses to the new tenant.
As Ed explains “The use of Microsoft Sharepoint, Office365 and Skykick Cloud Backup means that we have a copy of anything and all versions of saved files that have ever been saved to Sharepoint. Compete366 supplies the licences for Sharepoint and O365 and make sure we have exactly the licences we need to meet our needs.”
As part of the solution, Compete366 also provided the SkyKick Cloud Backup service for backing up the O365 content in both tenants. SkyKick Cloud Backup is a cloud-to-cloud backup of Office 365 SharePoint, MS Exchange, MS Teams and OneDrive for business data with unlimited backup and 1-click restore. All the data is backed up to Microsoft Azure, and the SkyKick service has Azure storage accounts in different geographic regions allowing customers to select their local region.
As Ed explains “We had one of the Compete366 engineers work with us on the project. He was exceptional and even assisted on some issues caused by the migration which were outside of the 365 domain. Running Office 365 and Sharepoint via an Azure domain gives us a high level of control including user access and data sharing without needing an in-house server to maintain. It allows me to administer access or revoke access to our data. It has been hugely beneficial through lock down with everyone being able to access data and synchronise from anywhere at any time. We have run this system for around 10 years which just shows how ahead of our time we are!”
If you’d like to find out more about our Expert O36 to O365 migration services then do get in touch. We’ll be pleased to help.
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