Case Study - Office 365, Sharepoint, & MS Teams Rollout

Real Estate Council of Alberta

Case Study - Office 365, Sharepoint, & MS Teams Rollout

Real Estate Council of Alberta

THE CHALLENGE

The Real Estate Council of Alberta (RECA) was seeking a qualified vendor to provide Office 365 system integration and implementation services. The scope of the project was to migrate RECA’s on-premise environment and RECALive (SharePoint 2013 Intranet) to Office 365. Email services and electronic content stored in RECALive are in-scope of this project. 

THE OUTCOME

Successful rollout of Office 365, SharePoint Online and Teams across the organization. ARC also provided strategic direction and Teams architecture recommendations around the onboarding and offboarding of new Teams & SharePoint sites.

ABOUT THE CLIENT

RECA is the independent governing authority that sets, regulates, and enforces standards for real estate brokerage, mortgage brokerage, property management, and real estate appraisal professionals in Alberta. RECA licenses and regulates real estate agents, mortgage brokers, property managers, and real estate appraisers to enhance consumer protection.

Business Case

RECA identified that their unstructured content stores and communications / meeting platforms were failing to meet some of their key organizational and strategic objectives. These were:

  • Security & Compliance
  • Consistent, Centralized Device & User Experience Management
  • Inconsistent Meeting & Audio Call Experiences
  • Effective Intra-Office & External Communications
  • A Dynamic, Engaging Intranet Portal
  • Structured Data Governance & Information Classification

With content spread across on-premises SharePoint farms, file shares & user mailboxes, it was time to consolidate their concerns into a single service offering.

The overall objectives of the Office 365 project included readiness assessment, preparation for O365 migration, production cutover, training and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and post-support. ARC was awarded the contract through an RFP process.

"More than 200,000 organizations use Microsoft Teams in 181 markets across the world"

Business Solution

Office 365 is Microsoft’s flagship cloud productivity suite, enabling organizations to realize massive savings and increased efficiencies by equipping their information workers with the tools they need to be their most effective.

Microsoft Teams is a unified communications and collaboration platform that seamlessly ties together OneDrive, SharePoint, Instant Messaging, Persistent Communications & Meeting Management into a single user experience.

Such a paradigm shift is a tough pill for users to swallow, as it entails a substantial shift in how they communicate and collaborate with their peers. ARC helped ease this transition through a handful of key activities:

“The ARC consultants have excellent technical, communication and leadership skills. ARC is truly a long term IT consulting partner of RECA."
Stefan Myroniuk, IT Manager
Real Estate Council of Alberta

The project was split into a few major phases:

Change Management & Communications

ARC led change management strategy & ideation sessions alongside internal technology and communications teams to help develop a consistent narrative as we rolled out a new intranet portal based on SharePoint Online alongside Microsoft Teams. ARC recognizes that the people barrier is the most difficult for organizations to break through, and through its experience in rolling out highly complicated ECM & Office 365 solutions at the Enterprise scale.

 This process also involved one-on-one stakeholder interviews with managers, directors and staff to understand how each business area uniquely produced and shared information.

Tenant Configuration & Exchange Migration

Almost every Office 365 rollout will begin with a migration of on-premises exchange environments into Exchange Online. ARC provided guidance on following leading Microsoft practices for configuring a hybrid exchange environment and migrating on-premises mailboxes to the cloud.

Intranet Portal Modernization

RECA Live, the intranet portal at RECA, was based on SharePoint 2010. RECA highlighted that it was static, un-engaging and didn’t consistently follow their corporate brand. Arc worked with mockups provided to communications to develop a new and improved RECA Live leveraging SharePoint Online modern pages and a third-party components library – ShortPoint.

 The reinvigorated RECA Live is dynamic, collaborative and consistent with RECA’s branding and communications objectives. It features:

  • Dynamic news feeds, including the ability to highlight featured news along a “hero banner”
  • Dynamic events and announcement feeds
  • An employee spotlight section
  •  A kudos feed, that leverages Yammer to enable staff to send each other kudos on a public forum
  • Social feeds from Twitter & Instagram
  • Rotational polls built upon Microsoft Forms

Teams Adoption, Rollout & Training

ARC facilitated classroom-based engagement and training sessions for all major business units at RECA. These had the goal of familiarizing staff with their new information management and communications toolset (O365, SharePoint, OneDrive & Teams). The secondary purpose was to initiate excitement and momentum amongst users, causing them to self-champion these toolsets to other business units.

Next Steps

Thanks to Office 365 and a partnership with ARC, RECA is well postured to tackle some of their other key business objectives, including records retention & labeling and the implementation of a global taxonomy across content stored in SharePoint Online & Exchange.

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