Like most UK councils, City of Wolverhampton faced financial challenges through budget cuts and central government constraints. They wanted to maximise efficiency, embrace invocation and do more with less. Adopting a cloud-first ICT strategy would bring cost-savings and give them the benefits of cloud computing.

Led by Enterprise Manager, Paul Dunlavey, the council wanted to move to Office 365 and replace their existing Exchange email solution. With thousands of seats to migrate, the in-house IT team wanted to be involved with design, configuration and migration.

Core collaborated with the council on a series of workshops to understand their needs and design a solution to support their long-term goals.

Core’s consultants worked closely with the in-house team to install and configure Office 365, replacing the on-premises Exchange solution with email and collaboration services based on Skype for Business and Exchange online. They then assisted the team in migrating the first group of users.

Throughout the project, Core tailored its services to suit the council’s needs, even switching consultants to get the best fit. Feedback was that Core exceeded the council’s expectations.

Skype for Business’s instant messaging capabilities have been widely adopted, and the burden on the in-house ICT team to manage the IT infrastructure has been lowered. The disaster recovery and business continuity benefits of moving to the cloud has helped City of Wolverhampton adopt more strategic ICT goals, while Office 365’s provision of 1TB per user of cloud-based storage immediately frees up server space and also cuts future requirements for additional storage.

Following the migration to Office 365, City of Wolverhampton has a more agile, flexible style of ICT. The council has since migrated the remainder of the user estate alongside their daily work, which was possible due to the streamlined process Core created.

Paul Dunlavey, Enterprise Manager, City of Wolverhampton Council:

"Core’s response seemed to fit with what we wanted. They had done it before, had the right experience and had good timelines. Cost was one of the main factors, as we’re a local authority, but we also had a good gut feeling that we could work with these people. There was an immediate synergy between us and Core. [Their consultant] was extremely flexible in his approach, working both on and offsite, answering questions via email at all times of the day and night."

"Originally, we wanted assistance with the first 250 mailboxes and then we’d go on our own. The knowledge transfer was quite comprehensive and after just 100 [migrations] we were quite happy with the process. It worked repeatedly so we took it on ourselves."