EHL – EHL employs Microsoft Teams to strengthen collaboration.
Communication, collaboration, talking—some key values of the EHL Group. Collecting and centralising its Office 365 tenants with a view to reinforcing the links between the various global EHL campuses and fostering dialogue between its campuses in Switzerland and Singapore were the aims of this major project.
Project details.
- Professional Services
- Education / Research
- Microsoft, BitTitan
- 250–1,500 employees
The challenge.
The EHL Group, notably including the EHL Hospitality Business School (founded in 1893 as The Swiss Hospitality School (Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne), wanted to strengthen links and foster dialogue between its various campuses. Driving factors for the project were the acquisition of a new campus in Passugg, Switzerland as well as a new centralised IT setup.
- Facilitating better collaboration between users of the two tenants, this requiring migration of Exchange Online and OneDrive, as well as Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.
- Setting up centralised management of the Office 365 tenant.
- Providing Passugg campus users access to EHL internal resources via a trust between the Active Directory in Passugg and EHL.
The solution.
We set up a workshop with our client’s IT teams to establish the requirements, restraints, and prerequisite of this major project for EHL.
With the information collected, our experts were equipped to select the right tool for the situation. They decided on the BitTitan MigrationWiz, which corresponded perfectly to our client’s expectations both in terms of functionality and cost.
In order to ensure project implementation, our teams performed tests to validate various technical points and risks identified with Marco Grosso, EHL Group Digital Services Delivery Manager, and his team.
Our experts then organised the migration project into several phases.
- Phase I consisted of a study of the different environments and collection of all information required for implementing the migration. Our teams analysed the Passugg campus’ Office 365 environment in detail.
This was in order to highlight all points to be aware of, hurdles, and the different domains to migrate. - Phase II was devoted to cleaning up the identities in order to determine which accounts to migrate.
The aim was to assign the various user profiles (students, lecturers, admin staff...) the right resources and implement the right migration process for each one, in the knowledge that EHL’s IT teams had no information about the Passugg campus. - Phase III served to define the procedure and the different stages required for migrating the data, taking into account the constraints on the different profiles.
- Phase IV was validation of the procedure from beginning to end with tests carried out via accounts and a test domain, correcting issues where needed.
- In phase V, our experts pre-synchronised the data for migration preparation.
- Phase VI was the culmination, which saw migration take place over a weekend. Both the identities and the remaining data were then migrated to the target client. The Bechtle experts were then quick to resolve any issues during this key stage, which enabled the migration to be completed on time.
- Finally, phase VII handled post-migration support for EHL’s IT teams to define user support.
“Project management was one of the key points of this migration. Bechtle’s teams perfectly managed all steps. The coordination with our IT team was very good, both professionally and personally—Bechtle’s experts were at one with our team which guaranteed success. The interactions with our Key Account Manager were in keeping with this beacon project for EHL,” Marco Grosso tells us.
Both in the run-up to the project with our Key Account Manager, and during the migration, we were very happy with our relationship with Bechtle. The teams are still demonstrating their responsiveness and professionalism, meeting our needs and successfully meeting the challenges posed of them.
For us, Bechtle is a trusted partner we’ve already realised numerous projects with and with whom we would not hesitate to take on new challenges.
Marco Grosso, Digital Services Delivery Manager for the EHL Group.
Benefits.
“The integration of the Passugg campus meant centralised management from an IT perspective. We wanted to mark the merger with a strong signal, and this migration was our first step in this direction. An integration is never a simple thing, but this migration was carried out very well, and we know that the forthcoming changes will be well received. Especially since this major step has let us hugely simplify management and governance. We are now all on the same tenant, benefiting from the same support, our interactions have been strengthened and this is all in the spirit of the EHL Group strategies,” Marco Grosso reports happily.