This case study explains how Compete366 worked with Langstaff Ellis, a supplier of bespoke joinery, to provide an Office365 to Office365 email migration.
Download a PDF version of the case study
Business Background
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 Business Challenge
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.”
The Migration Project
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.
Microsoft Infrastructure Benefits
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.
Key Benefits of the O365 to O365 Migration Project
- Seamless transition of Cutlist email and sharepoint users to new O365 tenant
- High level of control over user access and data sharing
- No need for costly in-house servers
- Cloud to cloud backup provides peace of mind
- Enables hybrid working for business continuity
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.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this Case Study, then sign up to receive our monthly newsletter where we share new blogs, technical updates, product news, case studies, company updates, Microsoft and Cloud news.
We promise that we won’t share your email address with other business or parties, and will keep your details safe. You can choose to unsubscribe at any time.
Newsletter Sign Up
Contact our Microsoft specialists
Phone or email us to find out more – or book a free, no-obligation call with our technical consultants using the contact form.
“It’s great to work with the Compete366 team, the team members are really knowledgeable, helpful and responsive. No question is too difficult for them. They have really helped us to manage our Azure costs and ensure we have the right environment. When we bring a new customer on-board we can scale up immediately via the Azure portal and quickly make environments available to our customers.”
“We also find that there’s never a heavy sales pitch from them – they are technically focused and recommend what’s right for us.”
“We had great support from the Compete366 AVD expert, who was really helpful, and guided me through options to tackle issues that arose.”
“The great thing about our AVD set up is that we have a custom set up for each project which Compete366 showed me how to do. And with the scalability and flexibility of AVD – we can meet clients’ expectations and get project users up and running more quickly.”
“We were immediately impressed with the advice that the Compete366 specialists in Azure Architecture were able to provide. This was all new to us and we really needed some external expertise that we could use to get our questions answered. The beauty of working with Compete366 is that we transferred our Azure consumption to them, and at the same time received all of their advice and guidance free of charge.”
“Working with Compete366 has been like extending our own team – they are extremely and easy to work with. Right from the outset, it was clear what was on offer – everything was presented to us in a straightforward and uncomplicated way. They also provided just the right level of challenge to our developers and saved us time and money by suggesting better ways to implement our infrastructure.”
“Compete366 were able to help us leverage some useful contacts in Microsoft. We really value the expert advice and guidance that they have offered us in setting up a highly scalable infrastructure. We are also setting in place a regular monthly meeting which will allow us to further refine our architecture and ensure we keep on track as our requirements grow and change.”
“I have been delighted with the migration, where my team worked very hard, supported by expert advice from Compete366, and achieved everything in the timescale we had set out. Compete 366 made sure that we didn’t make any expensive mistakes, and guided us through the process”
