Case study: Roedean School
Replace Exchange Server with Microsoft Office 365 for Education
“We could not have asked for a more perfect solution”
Shayne Parker – IT Manager, Roedean School
Company: Roedean School
Sector: Education
Roedean School was founded in 1885 to provide an education for girls that was at least as good as that available to boys at that time. The school, located near Brighton on the South Coast of England, provides a distinctively academic, high-quality, all-round education, within a caring and friendly community in a wonderful coastal setting.
Roedean Exchange server was nearing its end of life and becoming difficult to support internally. Roedean were made aware that Microsoft Office 365 was free for education, so wanted to investigate how it would integrate with their existing network. However, a fast transition time for all 800 mailboxes was imperative for the school.
How TechQuarters helped
TechQuarters aim was to move all 600 students and 200 faculty across to the Microsoft Office 365 for Education A2 Plan. Roedean’s key concern was the variety of devices that the school used; iPhones, Blackberries, Androids, Macs and PCs, and how Office 365 would integrate with all of these different devices. TechQuarters standardised all the school’s PCs and Macs to Microsoft Office 2013, set-up all devices to receive emails over Active Sync and then decommissioned the existing Exchange server and Blackberry server.
To improve internal process TechQuarters created multiple mailboxes to enable booking out resources such as the theatre or swimming pool. TechQuarters also created a SharePoint server to improve collaboration and to give the school an internal intranet. Finally Roedean were provided with full training on Office 365, ADFS and Powershell to ensure their internal skillset was up to speed and TechQuarters provided help-desk support after the migration.
What Roedean said
“We could not have asked for a more perfect solution for our school. Having email hosted in Microsoft Office 365 has meant we can reduce our number of servers by three, reduce our licencing requirements for Windows and email scanning, eliminate the headache of internal backups or Disaster Recovery and have saved precious time for our ICT staff. We’ve also got access to the latest federation technology, heightened level of security and enterprise-level tools.”
Shayne Parker – IT Manager Roedean School