When a community college that has helped students move on to achieve success for over 75 years needed to improve their internal e-mail portal and reduce IT troubleshooting requests, Managed Solution built a custom Office 365 deployment and migration project for them.

Industry: Education

Community College Brings Students and Faculty Together Through a Unified E-mail System

Business Needs: Sierra College was looking for a better e-mail solution for their students and faculty as their current email system was on legacy SunMail. They wanted to provide a single solution that would allow both students and faculty to access their e-mail from anywhere at any time on any device, while still providing security and meeting FERPA compliancy requirements. They also wanted to provide SSO to access both email and the campus portal. In addition, they wanted to reduce their internal IT help desk tickets by providing training videos and tutorials so the end-user could familiarize themselves with e-mail capabilities and tools. The overall goal was to provide a user-friendly e-mail system with unlimited access.

Solution: Sierra college had a unique situation in that their student email system resided on a legacy SunMail system. Their staff email, however, resided on Exchange 2010. With Office 365, Managed Solution was able to migrate both systems to Exchange Online with minimal impact to the students, faculty and staff. Exchange Online migrations provide innovative ways to migrate from any source email system. With Sierra College, over 70,000 mailboxes were migrated to Office 365 over a relatively short period of time. On top of this, using PowerShell for Office 365, Managed Solution was able to provide them a means of automating many of the identity management needs and licensing for existing and new accounts on-boarding to their college.

Success: Through Office 365, students were also provided with Microsoft Office online suite, allowing them to easily take lecture notes from their tablets, create reports and access their school work from anywhere. Managed Solution partnered with their internal IT Helpdesk and Hub to also create Office 365 training guides, Office 365 end user guides and communication templates customized for their institution.

Savings! With Academic licensing, costs are low! Besides savings, the training videos and instructions with FAQs and troubleshooting information is posted on their internal campus portal, helping to ease the transition and reduce IT support requests.

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