We purchased, configured the tool for OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange and were migrating all in the same day within four to five hours from when the other vendor’s migration solution failed. It allowed us to stay on target with the project. We really enjoyed working with the engineer assigned to us.
CMIT Solutions of Cleveland Northeast and Northwest (CMIT CNN) is a managed services provider (MSP) that profiles IT services for all types of businesses with a specialty focus on the SMB space. CMIT CNN takes care of IT so organizations no longer have to worry about it and provide operational excellence surrounding desktop, servers, backup, security, infrastructure and more.
CMIT CNN was executing a migration from a GoDaddy Microsoft 365 environment into the Microsoft 365 environment they were providing the customer. There were several advantages to this approach for the customer.
“There are restrictions on how an end user can use and consume Microsoft 365 that is hosted by GoDaddy. When you go to Microsoft 365 environment you get much more control from a licensing and functionality standpoint, which is why the customer ultimately decided to make the move,” said Kyle Ludwick, President, CMIT Solutions CNN.
Originally, Ludwick leveraged another vendor’s migration tool for the tenant-to-tenant migration before getting a rude surprise.
“The other tool didn’t have the ability to migrate OneDrive and SharePoint from the source into the target tenant, so it just migrated the emails and stopped,” said Ludwick. “The lack of support for OneDrive and SharePoint were not in the documentation and it put me in a pickle.”
The customer Ludwick was migrating was in the medical field and a 24/7 operation. Ludwick had already set the customer’s expectation on the scheduling which was carefully designed to minimize the impact to business operations.
“The customer had jumped through hoops to make the schedule work and only certain times were available to do cutovers or set up end users,” said Ludwick. “It was very important the transition went flawlessly because they rely heavily on email to run operations.”
Ludwick called his distributor and asked to be connected with AvePoint.
“AvePoint immediately had a senior sales and solution engineer ready to go. They didn’t ask unhelpful questions and assumed we had to execute on the timeline we said we did,” said Ludwick.” “We purchased, configured the tool for OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange and were migrating all in the same day within four to five hours from when the other vendor’s migration solution failed.”
AvePoint assigned an engineer to closely walk CMIT CNN through the FLY migration to ensure everything went smoothly within the tight timeframe allotted.
“FLY was very intuitive to use and easy to understand. The concept for creating projects for each individual component was similar to what we had used before, except that this time it was working,” said Ludwick. “It was an easy transition made even easier with the support from the engineer who we really enjoyed working with.”
The migration project ended up as a complete success.
“The customer was extremely happy. They weren’t aware of any of the challenges behind the scenes, just that we made the timeline with zero technical issues after the go live,” said Ludwick.
As a result of this successful project, Ludwick has retained the trust of a key potential customer.
“This absolutely helped positioned us with the customer for future opportunities, in fact we are currently in the proposal process of becoming their MSP,” said Ludwick. “So you [AvePoint] are helping us grow our business.”
Following the successful GoDaddy migration, Ludwick has leveraged FLY in two subsequent migration opportunities. His advice for other MSPs is don’t forget to factor customer support in the equation when determining which migration solution to use.
“The key thing is to take advantage of AvePoint customer service and call center, there are real humans that can work through issues with you,” said Ludwick. “As an MSP when you are scoping out these types of projects you are going in with misinformation, partial information, or missed assumptions and having a provider that can help you through those types of challenges when you are in a project is absolutely critical. No matter how much due diligence you do, you will always miss something.”
For Ludwick, it was the human element that separates AvePoint from other options.
“The biggest differentiator is that with AvePoint, you can actually talk to humans. With the other competitor, it is absolutely impossible to get to humans,” said Ludwick. With AvePoint you can explain a situation and there is a dialogue—you aren’t putting everything into a chat box and going through red tape.”
We purchased, configured the tool for OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange and were migrating all in the same day within four to five hours from when the other vendor’s migration solution failed. It allowed us to stay on target with the project. We really enjoyed working with the engineer assigned to us.