Our client was very ‘old school’, and anything related to IT was pretty much put on the back burner (her words). Their IT infrastructure was very dated, to say the least considering they had over 100 staff. Our client one day decided to provide email access to everyone in the company due to their ongoing growth. They had just two email accounts setup on Gmail that a select few of people within the company checked throughout the day. As the company grew,  our client needed a better solution as emails were getting missed which made the company look unprofessional.

Infusion IT was asked to provide a solution that was both cost-effective in the long-term and easy to manage going forward. They didn’t want to hire a full-time IT manager or IT company to manage the emails but still wanted as much ‘hands-off’ as possible. We discussed installing an On-Premise Exchange solution, but that was quickly ruled that out due to the initial setup and on-going maintenance costs. As soon as we talked the benefits of Exchange Online our client instinctively knew it was the best solution for them.

Setting up the mailboxes for the 100 staff and configuring their mail client (Outlook 2013) was probably the most time-consuming part of the migration. Luckily, the mailbox setup could be performed from our offices, but the actual Outlook setup had to be done on-site. Thankfully, due to only having a handful of existing email addresses, the data migration was pretty straightforward. Each mailbox was around 2GB in size apart from one, which was over 20GB. Luckily the client had a fast Internet connection with a decent upload speed which made the transfer possible within half a day.

To prevent as little downtime as possible, we primed our clients DNS with a low TTL (5 minutes) 3 days before the switch-over, which allowed us to ‘flip-the-switch’ quickly and easily once everything in place. Any emails that were received to the old mailboxes during the small switch-over window were simply forwarded on to the relevant mailboxes on the new system.

The migration took six days in total with only a small disruption to the client during the setup of the Outlook software. The total monthly cost to the client was around £350 for the hosted mailboxes. This may seem quite a lot; however, the cost to maintain an On-Premise Exchange server with ongoing support / IT Manager would have been considerably more. We had one happy client.