April 9, 2024
Feeding the future by merging 18000 users onto Office 365 and Teams including Microsoft phone system, calling plans, audio conferencing, meeting rooms/devices reducing infrastructure costs by 60%
Having had long-term partnerships with two agriculture industry giants, Long View played a strategic role in bringing together their two IT departments when the companies merged to create a global powerhouse. As the world's largest provider of sustainable crop inputs, services and solutions, the newly-merged company plays a critical role in feeding the future by helping growers increase food production.Looking to drive IT efficiencies and significant cost savings, the new organization turned to Long View to ensure optimal IT productivity and collaboration success.
One of the most immediate requirements was to ensure that all 18,000 combined users were on Active Directory, O365, and had email accounts. In addressing this need, Long View had to be mindful of the fact that the solution's architecture had to contractually adhere to privacy concerns, as the two organizations were to that point unable to share inside corporate information across the two companies.
Another critical consideration was for the merger between the two companies to be one of equals. As a result, neither organization wanted to retain or migrate any pre-merger applications. In meeting this requirement, and once again by setting up an Azure Active Directory in record time, including the rebuilding of various services, Long View created a "greenfield" environment in which there were no references to any of the old legacy company names.
Throughout 2018 and into 2019, Long View has:
- Migrated a total of 18,000 combined users onto Teams providing a secure, modern end-user experience for Unified Communication and Collaboration
- Created new O365 environment to host all services including Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams
- Onboarded all 18,000 users to Microsoft Phone System and Voice services
- Moved to an ecosystem that has integrated security capability for the company’s Unified Communications and Collaboration environment
Pre-merger one of the merging companies was in the early stages of planning a move from their on-premise Exchange to O365. As part of that plan, they were also looking to transition Sharepoint and Skype to the cloud. Immediately following the merger, the company's cloud strategy was accelerated, beginning with the transition of Skype and SharePoint, and the corresponding establishment of Microsoft Office 365 as the new company standard.
By creating the most efficient migration path, Long View provided outstanding value as a partner to enable a swift and seamless transition. In particular, their expertise in managing an immensely complex migration for the company's retail division and Australian business into a single-tenant platform was notable. As a result, the company has been able to provide a consistent, premium, end-user experience securely across the enterprise and on a global basis to empower both greater collaboration on ongoing innovation.
Today the world’s largest provider of crop inputs, services and solutions has an end-to-end Microsoft modern workplace environment. From the early phases of initial design and architecture through to post-implementation support, the Long View team is dedicated, through Collab Now professional services to consistently deliver the computing power our clients need to excel in a highly competitive global marketplace.
For this large-scale project, the following products and solutions are part of the new framework:
- Office 365
- Teams
- Exchange
- SharePoint
- OneDrive
- Azure Cloud PBX (Microsoft Phone System)
"Our goal was to modernize the newly formed company, previously consisting of two separate and independent IT departments, at very different stages of the cloud journey into the world-class workplace of the newly formed entity."
- IT management representative