GPG Exchange Migration

Gauteng Provincial Government

Customer Situation

The customer has approx. 36000 mailboxes in an on-premise Exchange Environment.

The current on-premise environment was being decommissioned and the contract with the service provider maintaining the environment was to be cancelled.

The customer experienced many service/support related issues with the current environment.

Partner Solution / Services & Microsoft Technology

  • Mint worked with Microsoft to provide all the services for the end-to-end migration of the mailboxes, including the ACM components.
  • This included project management, architecture, hybrid exchange configuration, tenant configuration, migration batches, change management, communication, post-migration support and user training.

Key drivers & Business Objectives

  • The customer has embarked on a cloud journey, with the view of moving all their collaboration and teamwork workloads to the cloud.
  • Exchange is a significant communication tool for the customer, and therefore was a key step in this journey to reduce cost, complexity and improve service reliability.
  • Customer wanted to reduce service provider reliance.

Value Provided & Business Outcomes

  • All the mailboxes were successfully migrated from the on-prem environment to Exchange Online
  • The internal customer technical team were upskilled to be able to support the environment post migration.
  • Additional security was deployed such as MFA.
  • Additional capabilities were demonstrated such as Azure B2B.
  • Support knowledge base was created to ensure the long-term sustainability of the solution

Win Insights

  • This was one of the largest mailbox migrations to Exchange online ever done (in terms of the number of mailboxes moved per day – 1000+)
  • Adoption and Change Management, as well as communication was key for this large project.

Lessons Learned

  • Strong Project Management is required on a project of this scale, and in Government sector.
  • Buy-in and support from customer leadership is key to success.
  • Adoption and Change Management needs to be part of the engagement from the start.