YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities Migrates Thousands of Users to Skype for Business, Including Cloud Phone Services, in Conjunction with Corporate Headquarters Move

Overview

The YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities recognized an ideal opportunity to migrate to a modern communications system on the occasion of a physical move of its corporate headquarters facility to a new building. The project involved over 3000 users across both headquarters and branch locations throughout the Minnesota & Wisconsin.

Of these, a combination of well over 1300 physical / soft phones with unique numbers associated to both end users and core branch functions. The voice component of this project included replacing nearly all the physical phones, which had been tied to an on-premise Skype for Business solution, with newer Polycom phones. This also meant porting over 1500 active phone numbers from the local phone carrier, CenturyLink, over to Microsoft.

Solution

YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities’ Business Technology department requested assistance with this Skype project as part of a larger effort to “get out of the datacenter business” by shifting key workloads to the cloud. The Business Technology department had already established a footprint in Office 365, with SharePoint being the first major workload shifted over.

The communications workloads—both Skype and Exchange—were natural next steps, and the timing was perfect given the upcoming move of the headquarters facility. One Concurrency team focused on setting up the Microsoft Azure services and worked closely with the YMCA’s internal Business Technology group on migrating critical business applications on a multitude of virtual servers.

Another Concurrency team focused on planning and execution of the migration of user accounts, including extensive preparation for the Skype for Business Online CloudPBX platform. This team included a technical architect, associate engineer, business analyst and project manager, working closely with the Business Technology group’s internal network, security and telecom engineers. Concurrency also worked with and trained a group of senior administrators to ensure the Business Technology team was well-prepared to administrate services going forward.

While any Skype and Exchange migration requires detailed planning to ensure little to no impact on users, this one called for a special focus on phone-related preparations given the transfer of phone numbers from CenturyLink to Microsoft to ensure all the numbers were accurately reconciled to the correct user accounts.

Working on email and phone platforms at the same time is both an ideal context for efficiency but can also be especially demanding because of unexpected bumps in the road that may occur when handling both platforms at the same time. Concurrency worked closely with the Business Technology team to resolve everything that came up. As desired, the project stayed “in the background” with little change to functionality users were accustomed to from email or phone perspectives.

From planning to execution, the Skype and Exchange project covered approximately four months of work, conducted largely from offsite but hand in hand with the Business Technology every step of the way. Concurrency was honored to be part of the YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities’ move—and modernization.