Skip to content

The National Youth Advocacy Service (NYAS) is a charity that operates across England and Wales. It provides services for children, young people, and vulnerable adults, including advocacy, independent visitors, and legal representation. Its headquarters are in Birkenhead, and it has around 180 employees and another 800 users who are self-employed workers and volunteers.

Results

With the migration to Office 365, NYAS experienced a significant improvement in email management and overall IT efficiency. The migration freed up in-house staff for other projects and provided users with reliable access to email, calendars, and contacts from their PCs and smartphones. The charity also benefited from free E1 Office 365 licences, which offered online access to Microsoft Office applications, enhancing flexibility and remote working capabilities. The successful migration led to decommissioning the on-site Exchange servers, freeing up additional resources and storage.

Services Delivered

boxxe provides free advice on which Office 365 plan to use, enabling substantial cost savings from free E1 Office 365 licences. Project completed within 8 weeks.

Technologies Deployed

1,100 mailboxes migrated to Office 365.

Industry Sector

NYAS is a national children's charity, providing a range of services to young people nationwide.

Business Driver

NYAS needed a efficient IT solution to handle their storage enabling their staff to work more effectively.

Kids playing tug of war

Challenge

NYAS was previously providing its staff with email using Microsoft Exchange servers internally hosted and managed from its office in Birmingham. This was time-consuming to manage for its IT team of four people, of whom only two were on-site in Birmingham and qualified to manage the Exchange servers. Also, with its storage nearing capacity, users were severely restricted in their mailbox size.

Plan

boxxe Group’s Microsoft licensing specialist helped NYAS to understand the different Office 365 plans and identified that NYAS qualified for free licensing under Microsoft’s charity licensing scheme. This laid the foundation for a cost-effective migration to Office 365.

Approach

To address the storage and management issues it was experiencing, NYAS decided to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 and turned to Total for help. Total’s consultants provided expert help and managed the migration process, ensuring minimal disruption to NYAS’s operations. The team worked tirelessly, even out of hours, to resolve any issues promptly.

Outcome

With its Office 365 licences, NYAS is now using hosted Exchange Online. This gives users access to email, calendars, and contacts from their PCs and smartphones. The charity benefited from free E1 Office 365 licences, providing online access to Microsoft Office applications, such as Teams, Planner, Yammer, and Forms. The successful migration was completed within eight weeks, allowing NYAS to decommission its on-site Exchange servers and repurpose them for other services and additional storage.

The boxxe Group brought the licensing options to our attention, and when I did the cost analysis the savings were just massive. From the start, we had a good relationship with the account team – they were responsive, and they got the job done.

All the way through, they clearly knew what they were doing, and when we hit a few minor issues with our previous network configuration, we worked together to sort it out – in fact, they were up until 4am one night to fix an issue, so our users wouldn’t be affected the next morning.

Technically, we would have been able to do the migration ourselves, but it would have needed an enormous amount of out of hours work, and would probably have taken us a year. Getting the boxxe Group in to help meant we could get it all sorted within eight weeks, which we’re really happy about. With the migration complete, NYAS has decommissioned its on-site Exchange servers, which are now used for other services, and for additional storage.

Dean Burgess
IT Service Manager
NYAS

Get In Touch

Contact boxxe today to find out how we can help streamline your Charity IT infrastructure and improve efficiency with our expert solutions and services.

0330 236 9429
boxxe logo

I would like to receive news and updates: