Local Charity The Trussell Trust, Adopts Full Cloud Services in Salisbury

Introduction 

Our Client 

The Trussell Trust is a leading anti-poverty charity which supports a nationwide network of food banks. Together they provide emergency food and support to people locked in poverty and campaign for change to create a hunger free future where food banks are no longer needed. There are more than 1,200 food bank centres in the Trussell Trust’s network, roughly two thirds of all the food banks in the UK. The Trussell Trust supports these food banks to provide nutritionally balanced emergency food parcels to people in crisis who have been referred to them by advice agencies, GPs, schools, and others. Food banks also offer people support and guidance to help them resolve the crises they are facing.

The Problem

Inconsistent software across workstations and laptops, outdated servers and a need for a more flexible working environment

The Trussell Trust was running a fully supported version of Windows server in a hypervisor environment with VM’s running Active Directory and Exchange 2010 and file shares.

Workstations and laptops were running a mixture of Windows 7 and Windows 10 with Office 2010. A 2008 R2 terminal server was being used for remote access and was due to go out of support with Microsoft.

The organisation wanted to get all IT systems, workstations, and laptops running supported software and the latest Microsoft Office applications.

They also wanted to get away from the old version of Microsoft Exchange and move their files to the cloud and migrate into SharePoint to become less reliant on on-premise servers and remove the 2008 R2 Terminal server.

The Solution

Utilising the full suite of Microsoft Office tools to ensure consistency and collaboration 

• A new Microsoft 365 tenant was created using the not-for-profit portal. AD Sync tool was installed into their on-prem environment and their Active directory was synced up with M365 in full hybrid mode.

• The appropriate licensing was applied to the users, workstations and laptops were upgraded where appropriate and the new office applications were installed.

• Once all machines were upgraded, the email hosting on Exchange 2010 was migrated using the cutover migration process to cloud-based Exchange online. This was done with no email downtime for the users.

• Once the mail was all cut over, the Exchange 2010 server was de-commissioned and switched off.

• To provide a solution for remote access so that the old terminal server could be removed before a SharePoint migration could be done, we deployed Direct Access for all users which were licensed for Windows 10 Enterprise under their not-for-profit E3 Licensing.

• As soon as the Trussell Trust was able to proceed with the migration of files to SharePoint, this was done using the Microsoft SharePoint Migration Tool in a staged manner to avoid users not being able to access file shares.

• Once each share was migrated it was made read-only on the on-premises systems for reference purposes only and to ensure continuity of data.

• Microsoft Teams was also deployed during this stage to make every user experience much easier and more flexible.

• The only exception to the SharePoint Migration was the Accounts files that were required to stay on-premises due to the accounting package in use. However, we were able to utilise the Direct Access system that was deployed earlier in the project to assist with remote access to this.

The Outcome

Fully supported and up-to-date in a Hybrid cloud environment

The finished project meant that the organisation is now running its IT systems on fully supported software and operating systems, with the latest office applications in a Hybrid cloud environment. Staff are able to work much more efficiently moving forward with flexible working, with the majority of their systems fully cloud-based.