Case study: Caroline Chisholm School
Office 365 for Education Implementation
“They are the type of company that cares about the quality of solutions they deliver and it shines through in their work ethic, project delivery and support.”
Barry Jeffrey – IT Manager, Caroline Chisholm School
Company: Caroline Chisholm School
Sector: Education
The Scenario – Migrate email and collaboration data to Microsoft Office 365 for Education
Caroline Chisholm School is home to a range of students from 4 to 18 years old. Representing an entire span of life from child to adult, CCS feels a huge responsibility to ensure their students receive the best education possible in preparation for the workforce. A school of the 21st century, they are leaders in innovation, and specialise in Business and Enterprise.
Barry Jeffrey, the IT Manager from Caroline Chisholm School, approached TechQuarters to help move their system from Exchange 2010 to Office 365 for Education. He felt it was the perfect platform to enable communication and collaboration amongst students and faculty, whilst also giving students the chance to master tools they would need for their future.
CCS had initially wanted to do the Office 365 for Education implementation themselves, but did not have the resources and found the Microsoft documentation to be somewhat of a minefield. Subsequently, one of their major requirements was to identify a partner that would work hand in hand in collaboration with their IT Department, an approach that TechQuarters adopts with all customers.
Barry was looking to migrate over the half term holidays while users were not on the system as actively as during term time, and TechQuarters was able to guarantee an impressive timeframe that would enable him to be up and running quickly on Office 365. He also requested Single Sign On for over 3000 users, and TechQuarters proposed a cost efficient solution to transfer mail, calendars and contacts that eliminated the expense of third party tools.
TechQuarters’ mission was to notify all staff of the email system upgrade, setup an Office 365 account, verify the domain, license users on Office 365 for Education (A2 for students and faculty), setup Federated Services, ADSYC, distribution groups, public shared mailboxes and migrate historical emails for all users.
How TechQuarters undertook the Office 365 for Education implementation
TechQuarters asked CCS to prepare two servers for Federated Services and created an Office 365 account. The Office 365 account was configured ready for Single Sign On and Office 365 defaults were changed to CCS preferences. TechQuarters configured the first server for Federated Services by providing a new public IP address to accept login requests and enable users to authenticate against their local Active Directory.
The next step was to configure the second server for Active Directory Sync so all users could be synchronized to Office 365 for Education. Users were then copied to Office 365 and allocated a license for the services chosen for them. The on-premises Exchange Server was connected to Office 365 in order to setup the Hybrid configuration for the migration of mailboxes.
Once the migration wizard was run and completed, the public folders were uploaded and shared between users. A date was chosen to go live with Office 365, the premise was turned off, and the webmail URLs and other DNS records were changed to Office 365.
The Results
- Federated services and ADSYC were setup
- TechQuarters demonstrated how to setup mobile devices for staff
- TechQuarters demonstrated how to setup Outlook connectivity
- TechQuarters trained CCS on Powershell commands
- Public shared mailbox was setup
- All users migrated seamlessly with no change or disruption from the front end
What Caroline Chisholm School said
“TechQuarters presented itself the ideal partner for our IT team to learn from and grow with. Their consultants were more than open, flexible and willing to work alongside our team. Their reputation as Cloud Champions is well deserved – our system was facing some problems but TechQuarters did whatever it took to deliver the project on time, and within budget. They are the type of company that cares about the quality of solutions they deliver and it shines through in their work ethic, project delivery and support.”
Barry Jeffrey – IT Manager, Caroline Chisholm School