YMCA Liverpool and Sefton is a registered charity and company limited by Guarantee. They were founded in 1846 and so build on a long history of providing hope and support for people experiencing challenging times in their lives . They deliver services 24/7, 365 days a year in the areas of accommodation, family work, health and wellbeing and training and education.
THE CHARITY’S REQUIREMENTS
YMCA Liverpool and Sefton has nearly 200 staff across 11 offices in Merseyside and were operating with an under-invested and aging Microsoft Remote Desktop solution. As the RDS environment was running on Windows 2008 Server (End of Life – 14th January 2020) across multiple non-enterprise physical servers, the entire infrastructure needed a redesign and rebuild from the ground up.
Mark Armstrong from inTEC BUSINESS secured the initial meetings with the charity and outlined his vision of a full Microsoft 365 solution with enhanced security, scalability with significantly streamlined costs.
FIRST STEPS
YMCA Liverpool and Sefton were using an old Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server, which regularly failed, was unsupported for many years and lacked a migration path to Office 365. inTEC BUSINESS drew up a project plan for the necessary migration, that would be carried out over a 3-month period.
During this time, inTEC BUSINESS agreed to support their existing systems to ensure the organisation was not exposed or vulnerable during the migration process. This support proved invaluable when the old Exchange 2003 Server subsequently failed requiring a full rebuild and restore.
THE SOLUTION
In order to decommission all the on-premise servers, inTEC BUSINESS built a Microsoft 365 SharePoint / Teams / Azure AD / Exchange Online environment, ready to receive all data from the obsolete system. However, migrating the data and making it available to all staff was hindered by the current PC specifications and broadband services at each site.
inTEC BUSINESS then replaced all the internet services across the 6 sites with a view to also replacing the YMCA telephone system with a fully hosted solution with softphones and new handsets.
YMCA also operated Sage Accounts (v23) which could not be migrated to Microsoft 365, as such InTEC BUSINESS are working to upgrade YMCA Liverpool to Sage Drive which will allow the accounts data to be accessed online.
inTEC BUSINESS have successfully migrated all company data to Microsoft’s 365 platform and replaced or upgraded all the user’s computers and laptops. The end-of-life systems were fully decommissioned and all security is now handled by Microsoft InTune and inTEC BUSINESS’s Managed BitDefender service.
DELIVERY & OUTCOME
Whilst the project took a little over 3 months to deliver, the delay was a calculated risk to ensure that inTEC BUSINESS could learn about the existing YMCA Liverpool infrastructure, how their staff operate and gather as much administrative information as possible.
The incumbent IT Support provider failed to provide a usable handover document, so inTEC BUSINESS had to create a full network topology and meticulously collate as much information as possible and reset credentials or systems where necessary. This included regaining control over their domain names, router access, administrator account access, local PC accounts and much more.
CLIENT FEEDBACK
“The transition to Microsoft 365 was done at pace due to circumstances and came just as the pandemic hit. This enabled us to continue to deliver our vital services but also support vulnerable staff members to work from home. Having inTEC BUSINESS as our IT partner has enabled us to concentrate on our charitable work and not have to worry our IT infrastructure.” Ellie McNeil, YMCA Liverpool & Sefton
CONTACT US
> Call us: 0345 565 1767
> Email us
> Visit us: inTec Business, Queens Chambers, 5 John Dalton Street, Manchester M2 6ET