Situation
risual recently helped a District Council move over 3000 active accounts to Skype for Business Online.
The Council had previously been providing Instant Messaging services from a single Skype for Business Standard Edition deployment, and had exceeded the number of users supported by this configuration. This meant that their use of audio/video and Skype meetings was limited to a select number of Skype users, and so some users were using 3rd party solutions.
Task
The council needed to ensure that users across the organisation could communicate and collaborate in real-time with each other, using a single platform with minimal infrastructure costs. The council also needed to ensure that users could have new functionality introduced to them at a controlled pace, ensuring the change could be communicated to all staff with training/guidance provided to support them where necessary.
Action
risual helped the council to introduce a temporary Skype hybrid configuration with Office 365 to migrate over 3000 active accounts to Skype for Business Online. Users retained their existing functionality, and client, whilst consuming services from Office 365. After the users were migrated the on-premises servers were removed and DNS updated to direct traffic to Office 365.
Results
By first migrating to Skype for Business Online, the council’s IT staff were able to remove servers from the estate without increasing support tickets. The council is now able to provide IM/Audio/Video and collaboration capabilities to all its current and future users from a single platform. By moving services over to Office 365, the council receives additional benefit from their investment in Microsoft 365 licensing. Collaboration and use of Skype/Teams meetings both inside the council and with external partners has increased, with all staff now able to partake without using additional 3rd party solutions.
Following on from this, the entire council is now progressing with a migration to (Microsoft) Teams-only mode, in advance of the Skype for Business Online switch-off. They are following the same process used for their Skype for Business online migration.
www.risual.com/contact | 0300 303 2044 | enquiries@risual.com
