The migration was seamless, especially compared to what a manual migration or a flawed or only partially successful migration using another tool would have meant. We were able to maintain the high tempo of the migration because AvePoint gave us the appropriate support and did not hold us up.
Quanos Solutions GmbH was founded in 2020 and is the result of the merger between SCHEMA GmbH, Docware GmbH, and TID-Informatik GmbH. The merger combines more than 25 years of experience and expertise in software development and customer projects. Divided into two specialist areas, Quanos Content Solutions and Quanos Service Solutions, the consolidated company employs nearly 300 people in Germany to develop innovative and sustainable solutions for more than 1,000 customers.
Quanos Solutions GmbH decided to migrate to Microsoft 365 to enable a more agile working environment so employees can access data from anywhere and at any time.
Easier collaboration was not the only reason for this decision. The once-separate companies had already begun to migrate to the cloud prior to their merger to form Quanos Solutions.
The union of the companies offered an opportunity to create a common Microsoft 365 environment and to provide a uniform, easy-to-use platform for all employees. Doing so meant that 16,000 items of existing content in Teams and SharePoint needed to be migrated to the new, combined tenant.
To allow the company to use existing Teams in the new Microsoft 365 environment, Quanos Solutions GmbH sought a provider that not only offered a seamless process but could also migrate Planner and Microsoft Teams private channels.
It was also important to retain existing work structures and mappings in the new environment for employees to readjust as little as possible.
To find the right migration solution, the company tested six different vendors, migrating two to three Teams with each vendor. Sample data was then examined, and the results were recorded in a decision matrix.
“The AvePoint migration tool was able to fulfill all the essential preconditions and was also easier to use than other products,” said Christoph Ostermayer, IT Administrator at Quanos Solutions, who led the migration process with his team. “With some providers, a number of functions were not present at all or were very unreliable.”
Following the decision to leverage AvePoint’s FLY migration product, Ostermayer and his team announced how the migration would take place in several stages across the company.
In particular, they explained how the data would look in the environments before and after the migration and how employees now find their way around in the new tenant. To that end, the IT department distributed several guides via e-mail and the company’s internal blog.
In the first step, Quanos Solutions GmbH migrated all Teams, with a differential migration following a few days later to migrate changes made over recent days. “On Monday morning, everybody was able to log into Teams in the Quanos tenant and get started,” Ostermayer said.
Migrating to the cloud was a crucial step for Quanos. Teams provides a means to make complex processes transparent and simplify them for employees.
“The migration was seamless, especially compared to what a manual migration or a flawed or only partially successful migration using another tool would have meant,” Ostermayer said, noting that he has received consistently positive feedback from employees and management. “The migration with FLY reduced the workload involved enormously.”
Furthermore, “we were able to maintain the high tempo of the migration because AvePoint gave us the appropriate support and did not hold us up. The support was brilliant — I only have positive things to report.”
The usability of the AvePoint solution also left a strong impression.
“The feedback from the software shows exactly what you want to know: whether or not the migration was successful — and, if not, where it failed and what the cause was,” Ostermayer said. “With AvePoint, the relationship between information and reporting on the essentials is very balanced. For us, that was a huge advantage and saved a lot of time.”
In addition to the technical requirements, the sales side played a key role in the selection of the provider.
“My contact person was with me from the beginning to the end and the communication worked superbly,” Ostermayer said. “That’s how it needs to be. What’s more, AvePoint support always responded quickly despite the high time pressure.”
