Universities Consolidate Multiple Productivity Suites

The project required the UWs’ IT staff to move 530 users from multiple domains to a tenant that used the Wisconsin.edu domain. About 350 users from various administrative departments were already on the target tenant.

The UWs turned to CDW to assist with the migration, and the system’s IT department collaborated with CDW engineers on the project. “We mapped out what needed to move, got migration paths planned out, tested them and went live in April,” Spadanuda says.

To simplify the migration, CDW engineers and the UWs’ IT team prestaged as much of the migration as they could so that the go-live effort would come off without a hitch, says CDW Senior Consulting Engineer George Talbert.

They created new user accounts on the target tenant. Weeks before the cutover, they used a Quest Software migration tool to begin moving terabytes of information, including SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, Teams, Power Platform and Power BI data, he says.

During the weekend of the cutover, they used a mapping spreadsheet that housed information on each user, so they could reset permissions and group memberships to ensure users could access all of their email and documents, Talbert says.

Today, the UWs is reaping the benefits. The administrative staff no longer has problems sharing data and documents.

“The efficiency it brings to our staff members and their ability to collaborate more seamlessly than before have been huge benefits,” Spadanuda says.

Consolidating licenses to one tenant has also reduced costs, he says. IT staffers no longer have to manage two Microsoft 365 environments, and being on a single tenant allows the IT department to roll out new services more easily. The system plans to launch phone service on Microsoft Teams in the future.

“We can introduce new products and features without worrying if one tenant is the same as the other,” Spadanuda says. “Trying to keep those systems aligned all the time was a hard proposition.”