About the Customer
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State University of New York at Old Westbury

The State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury is a public college that is part of the State University of New York system. 

The University is located near Long Island on a 604-acre campus, and it offers 45 undergraduate majors and degree offerings and 15 graduate degree programs to nearly 4,400 students. 

PRODUCTS & SERVICES

 

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Microsoft Azure Active Directory

Exchange Online 

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ProPlus

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Business Challenge

SUNY Old Westbury was using a wide range of Google Apps Services, including Calendar, Contacts, Drive (with Docs, Sheets and Slides), Gmail, Groups for Business and Talk/Hangouts. Additionally, it was using Skype for internal communications, and Microsoft Office applications. 

Adding to the complexity, the university’s IT department was supporting at least three versions of Microsoft Office, including Office 2010, 2013, and 2016. Purchasing licenses and using products from multiple vendors proved to be inefficient and costly to manage, plus it oftentimes led to incompatibility problems when users attempted to open Google Apps using Microsoft Office or vice versa. 

SUNY Old Westbury system administrators wanted to move to a single solution suite that provided email, business communications, and office apps to all faculty and administrative employees.  The solution would also need to support mobile device management and offer the latest security protection. To achieve its goal, the university’s IT department would need to hire an IT services firm whose pricing, project management, knowledgebase and consulting capabilities aligned.

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The SNP Solution

After evaluating several professional services companies, SUNY Old Westbury’s technical team selected cloud service provider SNP. 

With a unified platform strategy offering features such as Active Directory for mobile device management and built-in user rights management for optimal security.

To ensure it was able to provide a solution that met all the university’s needs, SNP gathered data on the infrastructure followed by an Active Directory assessment and directory sync configuration using Azure Active Directory Connect. 

Upon receiving approval of the project plan, SNP and SUNY Old Westbury’s IT teams collaborated in discovering mailboxes, distribution groups, and a shared mailboxes list from the legacy email system. Next, SNP proposed a migration timeline, so the client’s IT team could decide which users needed to be migrated with data, which users only needed mailboxes provisioned on Office 365, and which Office 365 license types should be assigned to each user. To stay within budget, the university decided to put students on the Office 365 ProPlus plan and faculty on the Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan. 

 

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Customer Benefits

To minimize risk and downtime, SNP and SUNY Old Westbury implemented a pilot test with a designated group of 20 users. Once the pilot was completed, the university gave the approval to migrate 5,040 users to Microsoft Office 365 email and to initiate an additional 13,500 users right afterward.

SNP and SUNY Old Westbury’s IT team worked together during the cutover period to move the email system to Office 365, and SNP successfully implemented scripts and assigned licenses to all 18,540 users. SNP tested the email flow and email content, and it provided post-project support for any user-related issues, which were minimal. 

 

“SNP provided a detailed project plan, managed and controlled all risks, and met our aggressive timeline. Most importantly, they provided innovative solutions to accommodate our budget. They are one of the few companies that could provide everything we needed — from project management and consulting to implementation and support,”  says Evan Kobolakis, CIO SUNY Old Westbury
 

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