“The successful tenancy migration, part of our strategic transformation journey, can be attributed to the strong and cooperative teamwork between ACU and SXiQ”
Niranjan Prabhu, Chief Information Officer and Director of IT, Australian Catholic University
Australian Catholic University (ACU) is a top 2% world-ranked university and sits in the global top 10 of Catholic universities. It operates seven campuses in Australia, an eighth in Rome and has more than 33,000 students, over 125,000 alumni and around 2,500 staff. ACU stands for meaningful education, impactful research, and life-changing community engagement.
Business challenge
ACU is dedicated to excellence in teaching and learning. They are on a strategic digital transformation journey, seeking to optimise learning, teaching, research, and associated services in order to support more collaboration, innovation, and the ability to deliver new solutions for staff and students.
ACU identified that the current Microsoft environment was affecting the university’s progress in these areas. Separate Microsoft 365 tenancies for staff and students was preventing staff and students from experiencing enhanced collaboration and communications opportunities offered by a shared tenant.
Combining tenancies immediately became a key program of work in this strategic journey. The tenancy migration program of work will combine the tenancies, streamline communications, improve collaboration for students and staff, and ultimately simplify IT operational support processes and scalability for the university.
Why SXiQ:
SXiQ was selected based on its deep understanding of Microsoft’s Teams and Active Directory environments which allowed us to architect a migration approach that not only solves the collaboration issues being experienced, but one that acts as an enabler for future digital transformation.
SXiQ has delivered multiple complex, time-critical, identity and Microsoft 365 tenancy migrations and mergers for some of Australia’s largest and best-known brands, helping those organisations better collaborate with their teams, customers and supply-chains.
Solution
This solution was delivered in key stages, with the first phase successfully being completed in just five months. The SXiQ team worked closely with ACU to deliver the solution which included:
- Redesign of student and alumni provisioning processes to span two tenancies
- Data migration for ~55,000 student accounts including email and OneDrive using BitTitan products
- Migration of shared mailboxes, and email distribution lists between tenancies
- Implementation of a 3rd party mail holding system to prevent any loss of incoming email messages during cut over.
This stage in the transformation journey has resulted in:
- Migration of:
- 53,694 student OneDrives
- 54,356 student and shared mailboxes
- Minimum disruption to student access and activities over the migration and cutover process (a key measure of success for ACU)
- Zero loss of incoming email messages during cut over window
- Update of technical user provisioning processes to accommodate management of users and retention of identity in two separate tenancies
Business outcomes
This project of work delivers a host of benefits for ACU, helping to drive a seamless experience for students and employees and reducing operational costs. ACU is now free to continue to delivering industry-leading communication and collaboration opportunities, in support of their pursuit of excellence.
The tenant migration has successfully unlocked:
- New opportunities in teaching and learning
- Improved and streamlined operations
- Enhanced collaboration capability.
The delivery of this project also enables ACU to deploy other dependent projects to improve the user experience and facilities for both students, staff and faculty as aligned with their strategic roadmap.
Client testimonial
“The successful tenancy migration, part of our strategic transformation journey, can be partly attributed to the strong and cooperative teamwork between ACU and SXiQ. Completing this important project of work, with minimum disruption to students and employees, enables us to continue championing and exploring innovative solutions to learning and teaching.”
Niranjan Prabhu, Chief Information Officer and Director of IT, Australian Catholic University
Other Blogs insights you may be interested in:
Let’s work *together
Ready to unlock the benefits of cloud? We’re ready to help.
