A mining company was running 1,200 users across 15 on-premises Exchange 2013 servers at its head office and mine sites, with no reliable mobile email, no multi-factor sign-in and servers that had passed end of support. Panda IT migrated all 1,200 mailboxes to Office 365 in two months, wave by wave, with no email downtime and no impact on 24/7 mine operations.
Key results
- 1,200
- users migrated
- 2 months
- across all sites
- 0
- email downtime
- 15
- servers retired
The challenge
- 15 ageing Exchange 2013 servers supported users across head office, mine sites and remote camps.
- Exchange 2013 was out of support, with no security updates and rising hardware and licence risk.
- Remote and FIFO staff had no reliable mobile email and poor Outlook Web Access.
- No multi-factor sign-in or controls on who could sign in and from where, in an environment used by contractors and vendors.
The solution & results
- Audited every mailbox, database, transport rule, shared mailbox, resource and third-party application dependency.
- Migrated all 1,200 users to Office 365 in staged waves over two months.
- Maintained email availability throughout the migration and retired 15 on-premises servers.
- Staff gained mobile email without disrupting mine site operations.
“We had been putting off the Exchange upgrade for years. Two months later the servers were gone, everybody had email on their phone, and the mine sites never noticed a thing.”