The Warehouse’s Office 365 Transformation

With an on-premises Exchange environment, and a lack of collaborative tools, TWG looked at several potential solutions before settling on Microsoft’s Office 365 platform.Transitioning from an on-premises Exchange environment to Microsoft Office 365presented significant technical and change management challenges. TWG needed to transition thousands of users, hundreds of Shared Mailboxes and critical resources like meeting rooms, all while ensuring accuracy, continuity and minimal disruption. Managing user provisioning, applying the right Office 365Licenses and keeping migration data clean and compliant posed major challenges for the IT team.

The goal was to simplify the migration process while maintaining business continuity and to do it all at scale.

TWG needed a solution that would:

• Ensure a smooth migration process with minimal disruption
• Automate user provisioning and license management
• Maintain data integrity and compliance throughout the transition.

Jon Scrivin, Shared Services Application Manager at TWG, says:

“The technical challenges were large; the change management challenges even larger; Activate helped us with both. The technology itself was always secondary to the changes we wanted to enable in behaviour and thinking. Our training and communication strategy were all about how these new tools could be used to change the way people work. Ensuring the transition for people was as smooth as possible was crucial to helping drive adoption.”

To support a smooth and controlled rollout, The Warehouse Group turned to Activate. Jon Scrivin explains why choosing Activate for the migration was an easy decision:

“We were already using Activate to manage our user account lifecycles and our goal was to have it automatically handle Office 365 license and service provisioning in the future.So it made perfect sense to use it for the transition as well.” ‍

With a solution built around automation, user empowerment and data integrity, Activate helped streamline each step of the migration.

Key Features:

• Automated Migration Readiness Checks:
  Activate automatically scanned each user’s Active Directory account to ensure they met Office 365 readiness requirements. It flagged any issues, updated accounts where needed and ensured appropriate Office 365 Licenses and services were provisioned.

“There are some complexities in the way Office 365 works. With some accounts over a decade old, legacy parameters would cause havoc if we attempted to migrate them manually. By using Activate’s automated process, we could validate each account prior to migration, giving us confidence that when the dashboard told us it was done that, we didn’t need to recheck

• Business-Led Scheduling:
  Using an interactive dashboard, project teams could filter users by department or location so that the migration could be done to a clear schedule, allowing the rollout to be driven by the business, rather than IT.

“The migration process catered for more than just technical steps by including things like training reminders, user surveys and clear communication at each step we were able to engage the team with the entire project and automating every step made change management a lot easier.”

• Comprehensive Resource Management: 

  Beyond individual user accounts, Activate also managed the migration of hundreds of Shared Mailboxes, meeting rooms and other directory objects. Each item was validated to avoid issues that could arise from outdated configurations.

• Payroll Integration for User Lifecycle Management:

  With real-time updates from TWG’s payroll system, Activate ensured employee data was always up to date, minimising manual rework and increasing accuracy.
• Automated License Management:
  With a significant investment in Office 365, careful management of user licensing is crucial to avoiding unnecessary costs. Activate assigns licenses automatically based on user roles and revokes them when staff leave. Activate also monitors usage, generates alerts and provides visibility to support license cost planning.

“With different license levels available to different roles across the group,manually updating things every time a team member transitions from one role to another would require a huge time investment. With Activate, it’s handled automatically; once the change is made by payroll Activate takes care of the rest, including license removals when a user leaves the business. Usage reports and available license alerts help keep on top of things and make budget planning easier.”

TWG executed its Office 365 migration over a focused 10-week period, migrating one region(around 10 stores) per week over a 10-week period, with Head Office completed in an additional three weeks. The phased rollout prioritised minimal disruption for users and delivered major savings in time and effort.

“When each team member came in the day after their department’s migration, they could power on their device and get straight to work using the latest version of the familiar tools”, says Jon Scrivin. “They had access to the same shared calendars and mailboxes, their apps were updated and new collaboration tools were ready to go. Using Activate to orchestrate the deployment meant things were as smooth as possible with minimal disruption for users.”

According to Jon, the benefits extended far beyond the user experience:

“Activate saved us hundreds of man hours of manual work, worth tens of thousands. The number of steps for each item is immense and that’s if it all goes to plan. Add in the software deployment and an inability to schedule when things happen and the manual workload would have been nearly cost-prohibitive.”

It wasn’t just IT that benefited.

“Our change &comms teams also saved hundreds of hours, as we were able to fold the communications into the relevant [automated] migration steps. The cost, time and effort savings have been tremendous and the outcome for users has been fantastic. Using Activate was a no-brainer.”