Telenor ASA is a Norwegian multinational telecommunications company. It is one of the world's largest mobile telecommunications companies with worldwide operations across Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Asia.
Telenor migrates over 3,600 customers to Office 365 from planning to completion in 12 Weeks
The business case for the change was very good — the return on our investment will be achieved in under 12 months. The deep domain expertise, experience, flexibility, and the processes we put in place with SkyKick and Insentra ensured a seamless transition to Office 365 for our customers.
Dag Rune Langehaug, Partner Executive, Smart Digital, Telenor Norway
Telenor Group, one of the world’s largest telecom service providers with customers across Europe and Asia, wanted to decommission a legacy email platform and migrate the existing customer base to Office 365. It wanted to ensure its customers had a seamless migration experience.
The Challenge
The task was large and complex: Telenor needed a fast, cost-effective way to smoothly migrate 3,600 organisations with 12,500 end users to Office 365 Business Essentials. All the customer domain name registrations had to be changed without causing any downtime. This was challenging due to the sheer number of organisations and end users that would require support over a short time frame
Telenor turned to SkyKick, a cloud management company whose partners use the company’s automation platform to deliver seamless migrations to Office 365, and Insentra, a collaborative IT services partner that delivers specialised professional and managed services.
The Approach
‘Plan, Build, Validate, Migrate and Assure’ Methodology
SkyKick and Insentra joined their strengths to deliver the highest-level migration technology paired with the best in programmatical project management and execution. Together, SkyKick and Insentra conducted rigorous analysis and performed a proof of concept to validate their solution approach. This resulted in a clear scope of work with a fixed price and guaranteed outcome.
Main Contributors to the joint success:
- Create project schedule and detailed timeline.
- Configure the migration tools to automate and accelerate the migrations.
- Process testing to ensure that the results were exactly as expected.
- Parallel customer mailbox migrations.
- Final handover and report.
The Outcome
SkyKick and Insentra devised a comprehensive, rigorous migration plan and methodology for Telenor. This involved Insentra applying the full automation of the SkyKick migration suite through the SkyKick API to move hundreds of customers’ mailboxes simultaneously with minimal impact to the system and users. The approach of migrating many small batches of mailboxes on a high cadence, instead of a big-batch approach, condensed the migration work from what could have taken six to nine months to under three months
The Results
Telenor’s customers were moved from a low-value, low-cost legacy mail solution to Office 365. There was a clear need to make the transition as smooth as possible, not only to minimize potential churn, but also to emphasize the additional value that Office 365 brings through collaboration features such as Microsoft Teams. Clear and well-targeted customer communications were key to drive home that message.