Merging two domains into a single Microsoft 365 tenancy
Lighthouse Learning Trust (LLT) have encouraged collaboration and made their systems more secure and by merging two of their domains.
The challenge
LLT’s two founding colleges deliver a variety of education and training programmes to post-16 students and adult learners across much of Hampshire.
The two colleges work closely together, along with the LLT Business Hub at Gosport, and have numerous M365 tenancies.
LLT wanted to bring these together into a single tenancy that could improve intercollege collaboration, but it was a complex task that trust IT staff didn’t have time to manage alone.
Lukasz Grochowicz, the trust’s IT manager, says:
“In an organisation like ours the IT environment is getting more complex all the time, and we want our own team to stay focused on innovations that benefit learning and teaching. Spare capacity is always at a premium, especially for a project like this that I knew could throw up difficulties.”
The solution
Lukasz decided to outsource the work which, under LLT’s procurement rules, meant asking three suppliers to respond to the tender. Using a third-party provider doesn’t only add resource and specialised expertise, it can also reassure risk-averse stakeholders and help with making the business case.
As a result of this tender process, LLT began working with Jisc and we hand-built a solution for their migration.
Our engineers, working with LLT’s IT staff on site, migrated 2088 mailboxes, 1,784 OneDrives, 39 Teams groups and seven SharePoint sites into the new single tenancy. We also provided aftercare services, including helping to nail down policies on end user devices.
“We chose Jisc for value for money and because they’re already a trusted partner. They really put in the effort and resources to get everything right and finished on time. With a few weeks to spare I felt confident to go on holiday without worrying about the start of the autumn term.”
Benefits
Merging the two domains has brought all the expected benefits for Lighthouse Learning Trust:
- Students can log in more easily and securely
- It’s easier for staff to collaborate. Access to M365 is quicker and more reliable with single login across the two sites
- Security patching can be done more quickly
- Managing settings is less onerous
- The trust is operating all its systems under a single designation and strengthening its brand
How it was achieved
Working as an extension to an organisation’s IT team, our cloud specialists held a scoping meeting with LLT in April 2023. Our experts also ran discovery sessions to identify compatibility issues, tasks that might need to be done manually and plans for how to avoid disruption.
We produced documentation to show how the finished merger would look and finalised the switchover date. Then, we did a tenancy health check.
This was a pilot programme and the trust’s feedback has helped us shape the service we’ve introduced since.
Work on merging the two tenancies started just before the colleges’ summer break, aiming to get most of it done when college systems were quiet.
We started moving some of the data before term ended, because this can happen in the background, but most of the heavy lifting took place early in the summer holidays.
As Lukasz had predicted, LLT had a couple of curve balls for us. They had many Microsoft Teams set-ups with varied structures, and numerous embedded apps, which didn’t always migrate correctly.
Tackling these issues brought new expertise that will help make future complex migrations like this much easier.
Best of all, there were no nasty surprises at the start of the new academic year.
Lukasz says:
“Everything was ready to go and staff saw the benefits immediately. Students noticed no difference at all. It was ‘business as usual’, and business as usual is great.”
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About Lighthouse Learning Trust
LLT’s two founding colleges work together closely to deliver a variety of education and training programmes to post-16 students and adult learners across much of Hampshire.
Together, Richard Taunton Sixth Form College in Southampton and St Vincent College in Gosport provide courses at levels 1 to 3 and a choice of full or part-time vocational training developed in partnership with local employers.
For 2023/24 the trust introduced T Levels, and apprenticeships will follow in 2024/25.