National Youth Advocacy Service
Moving to a larger IT infrastructure.
The National Youth Advocacy Service was previously providing its staff with email using Microsoft Exchange servers internally hosted and managed from its office in Birmingham. This was this time-consuming to manage for its IT team of four people, of whom only two were on-site in Birmingham and qualified to manage the Exchange servers. Also, with its storage nearing capacity, users were severely restricted in their mailbox size.
At a Glance
The National Youth Advocacy Service (NYAS) is a charity which operates across England and Wales. It provides services for children, young people and vulnerable adults, including advocacy, independent visitors, and legal representation. Its headquarters are in Birkenhead, and it has around 180 employees and another 800 users who are self-employed workers and volunteers.
Services Delivered
Technologies Deployed
Industry Sector
Business Driver
Challenge
NYAS, a national children’s charity, chose Total to handle a move from on-premise to hosted Exchange with Microsoft Office 365. Total provided expert help and managed the migration for NYAS, freeing up its in-house staff for other projects.
Solution
Initially, Total’s Microsoft licencing specialist helped NYAS to understand the different Office 365 plans and identified that NYAS qualified for free licencing under Microsoft’s charity licencing scheme.
To address the storage and management issues it was experiencing, NYAS decided to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 and turned to Total for help. Dean Burgess, IT Manager for NYAS said, “Total had been providing hardware and software to us for the past six years, and they’d given us a lot of peace of mind – they always gave us the best prices and could get us kit at the last minute if needed.”
Outcome
With its Office 365 licenses, NYAS is using hosted Exchange Online. This gives users access to email, calendars and contacts, from their PC and smartphones.
As a charity, NYAS was able to benefit from free E1 Office 365 licences, which provide online access to Microsoft Office, giving them more flexibility to log in remotely and work on documents, as well as other applications from Microsoft, including Teams, a group chat tool, Planner and task management program, Yammer and forms.
Taking Care of Technology
There's a greater demand than ever for businesses to utilise technology and we are here to make that process simple.
Dean Burgess
IT Service Manager,
NYAS
Total brought the licensing options to our attention, and when I did the cost analysis the savings were just massive.
From the start, we had a good relationship with Total’s consultants – they were responsive, and they got the job done. All the way through, they clearly knew what they were doing, and when we hit a few minor issues with our previous network configuration, we worked together to sort it out – in fact, they were up until 4am one night to fix an issue, so our users wouldn’t be affected the next morning.
Technically, we would have been able to do the migration ourselves, but it would have needed an enormous amount of out of hours work, and would probably have taken us a year. Getting Total in to help meant we could get it all sorted within eight weeks, which we’re really happy about.
With the migration complete, NYAS has decommissioned its on-site Exchange servers, which are now used for other services, and for additional storage.