Case Studies Skype for Business Deployment for Engineering Services Firm

Skype for Business Deployment for Engineering Services Firm

Overview

This client delivers engineering, science, and construction services to customers worldwide. To facilitate collaboration across geographical locations and with third parties, our client’s internal IT department embarked on a project to deploy Skype for Business.

The organization had previously been running Lync 2000 for instant messaging. The upgrade to Skype for Business was a step forward both in functionality—complementing instant messaging with web conferencing and desktop sharing—while also fulfilling a technical goal of consolidating domains across several business entities. In the new approach, one Active Directory domain would apply across all business needs.

Solution

Our role in the project began with building an on-premises Skype for Business server environment from scratch. To do so, we worked closely with our client’s network administrator to design the deployment and configurations. Throughout this process, we created documentation on this specific deployment so the organization’s internal team could benefit from going forward.

One important aspect of the project was ensuring appropriate DNS settings so users on the new Skype for Business environment could continue to communicate with other (existing) domains that, for the moment, were still served by multiple domain controllers.

Once the servers were built and tested, we brought test users onto the new domain. Then, throughout entire the migration process, users were served without interruption.

This project proceeded smoothly and in the space of only several weeks established a new environment. The result was increased productivity and improved technical management. We were pleased to deliver these results under budget and ahead of schedule.