Single tenant solution solves Univeristy challenge
A Qaixen Success Story
University streamlines collaboration with Microsoft 365.
The Client
This UK University operates across 4 campuses, welcoming students from 185 countries. Offering a variety of under- and post-graduate courses in computing and technology, art and design, engineering, law, business, economics, and more, it is rated as one of the top 350 institutions in the world by The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023 and is recognised as one of the top 40 universities in the UK.
The Challenge
Students at the University were using the Microsoft cloud for email, while staff was working with an on-premises email solution. The student Microsoft 365 tenant had evolved purely around the student workload and there was very little governance around Groups, SharePoint and Teams. They needed a single tenant solution where both staff and students could collaborate more efficiently.
Our Approach
Qaixen commenced the project by helping the university to migrate staff from the Exchange on-premises email to Exchange Online. We assisted in the shift from using Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams and configured Microsoft Teams at a tenant level, including conversations, channels, policies and apps, so all users could use Teams (SharePoint Online) for files as well.
We then moved all students from the old Microsoft tenant to the new one, creating custom ShareGate PowerShell scripts to migrate OneDrive in order to implement a well-governed structure that would work well for everyone.
Following a review of the incumbent SharePoint 2010 and PHP intranet, we helped the university migrate their staff intranet to SharePoint Online. We also consolidated user directories for staff while reviewing user data information flows in relation to GDPR.
Finally, we assisted in the implementation and upgrade of various information protection technologies across the Microsoft cloud stack. These included Microsoft (formally Azure) Information Protection, MFA and Secure Score.
Business Benefits
The overall project objectives were to improve collaboration and automate business processes. Moving all users to one single Microsoft 365 tenant delivered these, by providing the University with enhanced functionality, improved governance, and creating a modern, compliant and secure teaching and learning environment where everyone can collaborate much more efficiently.