Client Background:

• HET: The Humber Education Trust is a large multi-academy trust (MAT), comprising of 16 primary and special schools. Their family of schools share the same high aspirations, moral values and commitment to providing exemplary care and support, at the same time recognising and celebrating each school’s individual uniqueness. They are a DfE-approved Academy Sponsor which means that through the Trust, they are held accountable for sponsored schools who may join them, to ensure improvement in outcomes and taking responsibility for their performance and financial arrangements.

Project Overview:

• Trust collaboration: Each of the 16 schools had their own cloud based tenancy for email and data storage using unique school domain names. In order for them work more effectively as a trust they were looking for a solution to bring all schools into a single tenancy with a common domain name.

The Challenge:

• The HET schools had user accounts and data across 14 separate tenancies being a mixture of Google and Microsoft. Each tenancy had many file shares and there was limited overview of who had access to each of them. This would require our assistance to perform detailed analysis and make sure no data was lost at end of the process. The trust wanted a solution in place ready for the new school year, with the migration of user accounts and data over the summer holidays. Staff would need training and guidance on accessing the new system and for there to be no disruption to them being able to work.

Solutions Provided by NYES:

Project officers from various teams were involved in scoping and providing the full solution required by the trust which included: 

• Setup and configure a new Office 365 tenancy for the Humber Education Trust (HET)
• Create new HET domain name and sub domain variations for each school
• Collated all staff user account information from existing domains and tenancies for those accounts that were to be migrated.
• Analysed and collated all existing Shared Drive and SharePoint Document library information.
• Migrate 16 schools (approximately 1400 staff user accounts) from either separate Google domains (11 schools) or Office 365 tenancies (5 schools) into a single Trust wide Office 365 tenancy.
• Migrate all mail, calendars, contacts, personal files (My Drive / OneDrive) and shared files (Shared Drives / SharePoint)
• Create a new Teams structure for all schools and the Central HET management team.
• Create new SharePoint site for the HET and their schools
• Co-ordinate and communicate with individual schools and the leadership team throughout migration project.
• Provide ongoing post-migration support for Office 365
• Provide drop-in training sessions for all staff post-migration
• Provide online help articles for the HET via a dedicated section on our website 

Client Testimonial:

• Nina Siddle, Chief Finance & Operations Officer: Expressed high satisfaction with the outcome of the project, highlighting the thorough scoping and consultation throughout the process taking into account the needs of each school and the trust. The project was completed on time, with a seamless transition for all users with support throughout by our team.