Office 365 Migration Case Study

Law Firm of Stone, Pogrund & Korey – Chicago Law Firm

SPK Law, a law firm located in downtown Chicago, had the goal of transitioning their email and Office services from an On-Premise Exchange Server to Microsoft’s Office 365 Hosted Exchange.

The Challenge

SPK’s goal was to migrate away from their existing 2007 Microsoft Exchange Server and move all their email services, mailboxes, calendars, contacts and tasks to Microsoft’s Office 365 Hosted Exchange platform.  An added challenge was that SPK wanted to maintain their internal Active Directory infrastructure, which resulted in the client needing a hybrid Cloud/On-Premise Microsoft scenario.  The specific challenges in this scenario included:

• Ensuring that all Mailboxes, Emails, Folders, Contacts, Calendars, Tasks and emails that the 20+ users had accumulated over the last 10 years was properly moved into the cloud
• Making the transition smooth, with the cutover taking place on the weekend so that users could come in Monday and be ready to use the new system with little assistance and minimal downtime
• Maintain their internal active directory servers and have it work with the cloud system
• Ensure that their on-premise AD domain worked smoothly with the new cloud email system
• Transition in a way that would allow SPK to De-commission the Exchange server without losing any data, admin functions or network functionality

The Solution

With the Cloud Email Migration contract in place, LME worked with SPK staff to formulate a schedule and migration calendar with the result being a 2 week prep with a weekend cutover. The calendar and successful cutover went as follows:

• LME purchased and setup all of the Office 365 email services ahead of time, verified the SPK domain, created all the users/groups/public folders in the cloud and did a “pre-migration” move of the bulk of the SPK’s emails, contacts, calendars, etc.
• Upon confirmation that 90% of on-prem data had been successfully moved to O365, we created documentation explaining to users what was happening, how to remove their old email account, how to create their own O365 passwords, how to add the new email account to phones/computers/outlook and how to reach us in the case of any issues
• With documentation delivered, we did the hard weekend cutover on a Sunday and adjusted MX records, hosted DNS records and re-routed SPK email to the new cloud system
• Upon confirmation that email was properly routing we ran a final migration and moved all the remaining email data from on the on-prem Exchange server to O365
• By comparing mailbox sizes, we confirmed that all emails, contacts, calendars, etc. had been moved to the cloud and worked on-site the following Monday morning to make sure users were connected to the new system and that all their data was present
• We included 1 week of included support to ensure that all SPK staff were functioning and had all their items migrated to O365 Hosted Exchange and that no issues had arisen
• We then decommissioned their on-prem Exchange server and confirmed that cloud email and all on-prem data and domain servers still functioned

The Results

With the help of LME, SPK successfully migrated all of their email data and services from their on-premise Exchange server to Office 365’s Hosted Exchange platform while also maintaining internal Active Directory domain functionality with no lost data and zero downtime.