Migrating to Microsoft

Staffordshire Police Authority serve over 1m people in the Staffordshire and Stoke-on- Trent areas (circa 1,000 square miles) following the merger of Staffordshire County Police and Stoke-on-Trent City Police in 1968.

Staffordshire Police had been using IBM’s Lotus Notes / Domino platform for email and applications since the implementation of email for the organisation. With over 4,500 users reliant on email for communication and the clear importance of data security for an organisation such as Staffordshire Police, a carefully planned and implemented migration project was established.

The force sought an external partner to provide the expertise required with migrating to a secure Microsoft Exchange platform which met the forces key security requirements with minimal amount of disruption to the business.

Following a rigorous tender process, BCN Group were chosen as the preferred partner for the project and immediately set about assisting with the design of a Microsoft Azure private cloud supporting Microsoft Exchange to migrate the IBM Lotus Domino platform. A detailed project plan was established and scrutinised by all parties as well as establishing regular reporting mechanisms. Dell’s (Quest) software was deployed onto appropriate migration servers to support the process of co-existence and the migration itself.

The project was completed to plan and to budget, thus paving the way for the wider transformation project to continue. “As a migration partner BCN Group have been excellent. They helped to define a very detailed solution and brought a huge amount of skill and knowledge to the force to help us achieve our goals. They have been very approachable and that clearly helped with the success of the project” comments Alex Gore, Project Manager at Staffordshire Police.

“The professionalism of the project team, their personality (very very friendly people), they got on well with the team and in terms of their professionalism and expertise in the field of email migration and Microsoft adoption I think BCN Group are excellent and I would certainly recommend them to other customers” added Simon Ball, Chief Technology Officer, Staffordshire Police.