Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 Migration & Implementation for the IRMS

The delivery of a no-compromise, cloud-first environment

Solution Summary

The Information and Records Management Society (IRMS) is the foremost professional association for all those engaged in the management, governance or utilisation of information and records.

For more than 30 years, this Society has been supporting information professionals in the UK, Ireland and beyond, and promoting the profession across the public, private and third sectors.

The IRMS had defined a vision to deliver a suite of modern IT, business productivity and collaboration capabilities to the 40 volunteers across the Society, using the Microsoft Cloud to provide a no-compromise, cloud-first environment.

This programme of work would see the migration of content and services from Google Workspace into a new Microsoft 365 tenancy. As such, the IRMS needed our help to ensure the planning and transition to the new digital workplace was successful and that the setup of the new tenancy was carried out to a high standard and adhered to industry best practice.

Intelogy have a proven track record of helping organisations move to, and fully embrace the Microsoft Cloud, designing and migrating to enterprise class Microsoft 365 and Azure solutions from both on-premises and other cloud-based productivity platforms.

Challenges

The IRMS was keen to streamline its processes and make use of the collaboration advantages of using Teams. Besides this, most IRMS volunteers were more familiar with Microsoft 365 due to usage of the product through their day-to-day employment.

“Our goal was to move into a Microsoft 365 tenant without generating too much work for our end users and with Intelogy’s help we were able to do that. We were moved across within a few months of starting the operational phase of the project.”
– Suzy Taylor, Groups Director, IRMS

Solution Overview

Discovery

Our team envisaged this to be a collaborative process between Intelogy and the IRMS, working with the established project team at the Society to capture the requirements and impart knowledge to make sure the IRMS was comfortable making informed decisions and maintaining the platform moving forward.

Intelogy kicked off the project by hosting a discovery workshop with stakeholders of the IRMS to capture the requirements for the new tenancy and discuss best practice options. Our team needed to understand compliance and regulatory requirements for data residency. We also identified the licensing needs and predicted the associated costs.

Together, we discussed which security controls needed to be implemented to strike a balance between enabling productivity and securing identities, content and devices.

In terms of governance, we defined the extent to which both information and collaboration governance principles should be decided and implemented.

Finally, we also gained knowledge from the IRMS about their future plans for the platform, including the migration of data and content from Google Workspace to ensure the tenancy was ready to facilitate the next stages of the wider transformation project.

Build

Once all the requirements were captured, Intelogy proceeded with the implementation of the new Microsoft 365 tenancy and arranging for any necessary licence subscriptions.

In accordance with the agreed requirements, our Cloud Platform & Security Team configured all the security features to ensure identity and content protection. This included conditional access policies that enabled multi-factor authentication, disabled legacy authentication, and limited device access. We also provided the new tenant with a third-party backup and disaster recovery solution to prevent data loss and ensure business continuity in worst-case scenarios.

We provisioned the users with new identities and mailboxes, which were later used as part of the migration activities.

Launch

During the Launch phase, we prepared all the users for the new platform and ways of working. Intelogy provided training and handover sessions to ensure the successful adoption of Microsoft 365. Our team also deployed a Microsoft Learning Pathways site, tailored for the IRMS, to enable users to access on-demand Microsoft training material. A training session was also provided to the tenant administrators to educate them on the tasks required to maintain the platform, such as creating profiles, managing accounts and provisioning Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites.

Migration from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365

Throughout the engagement, a demand for the migration of email and files stored in Google Workplace was identified, and Intelogy was selected to complete this migration.

We outlined the different approaches of migrating to Microsoft 365 and the challenges and effort involved to help IRMS define the right migration strategy.

Our migration experts took time to talk them through the various migration tooling options available, allowing them to make an informed decision that best suited their requirements.

Our team successfully migrated all the required emails within Google Workspace to the appropriate mailboxes using the built-in mailbox migration tool available in Exchange Online.

Due to the Google Workspace files being largely unstructured, it was decided that a single SharePoint site and library would be used to house the files once migrated to Microsoft 365. This site and library would act as an archive rather than an active collaboration zone. Additional sites and teams were provisioned for day-to-day file storage and collaboration within the tenant, opting to start with a clean slate from day one. The Google Workspace files were migrated using the SharePoint Migration Manager.

Client benefits / Results

As Microsoft 365 evangelists, we can say that Microsoft goes above and beyond with the security features it offers and it’s definitely a few steps ahead of Google Workspace. The IRMS can now benefit from the advanced security tools only offered by Microsoft as well as a suite of great productivity and collaboration tools that volunteers across the society are familiar with.

Thanks to various training sessions our experts completed with the IRMS users, they are now enjoying a successful adoption of Microsoft 365 and are capable of maintaining the environment themselves.

Intelogy provided the IRMS with an environment that will enable productivity and enhanced collaboration whilst aligning with best practice security and governance principles.

The IRMS is now taking advantage of the various collaboration tools available within the Microsoft stack, such as Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online, but also more functionality like Teams Meetings and Webinars and Online Forms to allow members to communicate. more effectively and provide a streamlined service.

The sky is the limit now for the Society and their digital transformation journey.

“Our experience of working with Intelogy has been great. They anticipated many of our requirements and as volunteers, when we didn’t have the resource to get going, they helped us over the hurdles. The benefit of moving to Microsoft is that we now have more control over our IT estate. Working with Intelogy was painless and we got all the help we needed.”
– Suzy Taylor, Groups Director, IRMS