Microsoft 365 Deployment for Collaborative Work at West Berkshire Council

Case Study – Microsoft 365 Deployment for Collaborative Work at West Berkshire Council.

West Berkshire Council (WBC) provides a full range of local government services to the 160,000 citizens within its 272 square mile area.

2020 presented numerous challenges to us all, however the Council sucessfully rolled out Windows 10 across its entire estate and provided ‘always-on’ VPN to allow its workforce to work remotely, but required assistance with implementing Microsoft 365.

The council originally engaged with another partner to deploy the Microsoft 365 product set but turned to Quorum when technical issues proved more challenging than expected.

West Berkshire Council case study front cover

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“Working with Quorum was a real pleasure and a great fit for us at West Berkshire Council – They immediately assessed our situation and matched our workstyle such that it felt that we had adopted a group of expert colleagues and friends who ‘hit the floor running’, working with us efficiently and effectively towards achieving our complex objectives.”

Andy Best

Acting Head of ICT, West Berkshire Council

The council strives to keep the quality and breadth of it services high, whilst keeping its financial footprint to citizens low.

These goals could only be achieved if efficiency and productivity per employee was increased, which is exactly the capability we could provide by working closely with the council to develop a bespoke roadmap for product adoption.

WBC sought an experienced Microsoft 365 implementation partner who could safely upgrade to the cloud-based suite of software from their legacy on-premises systems and had to do so with no impact to WBC’s day-to-day business processes.

Quorum are a Modern Workplace Microsoft Solutions Partner with Azure and Microsoft 365 experts.

The benefits of using Quorum for this project included:



An experienced implementation partner with specialist skills.



A strong relationship with the Council’s inhouse ICT team and end-users.



Industry best practice and minimal disruption.

The Project and Solution

Initial fixes were made by Quorum to restore minimum required functionality and security policies to lock down the cloud environment, allowing time for the migration to be re-planned.

It was imperative to WBC that Quorum built a strong working relationship with the WBC in-house ICT team and end-users in order to enable efficient skills transfer, communication, and support. The Council utilises around 90 different business applications and databases to serve the various different departments within the organisation. These departments had BAU functions to perform in supporting 2000 staff who were mostly based outside of the office due to Covid restrictions.

A roadmap was created through collaborative workshops and discussions with both delivery and IT. The plan also provided a clear understanding of costs, timelines, and staff dependencies prior to the work starting.

What Was Done

Once the proposed approach was agreed by both parties the West Berkshire Council 365 Project could commence. The work included the roll out of functionality such as Multi Factor Authentication, Mobile Device Management, Active Directory, Conditional Access and OneDrive for Business.

1,900
Users

2,800 mailboxes
migrated

1,200 mobile devices
registered with Azure

15TB of email archive migrated

Over 60 change
records rasied

Following Microsoft best practice, Quorum was able to deliver the required scope successfully, leaving the Council with a modern, more manageable work environment and its users with the ability to work more collaboratively.

Quorum and the Council are now working together to maximise the efficiency and productivity gains from this.