Top real estate agency moves mailboxes and archive data to the cloud with Quest®

Benefits

• Completed a successful digital transformation project in just two months
• Migrated 1,868 on-premises Exchange mailboxes to Exchange Online
• Migrated 44TB of Enterprise Vault archive data
• Performed a Microsoft migration quickly and easily, without interrupting business
• Eliminated the administrative overhead of managing legacy email platforms

The Story

About the customer…

Founded in 1981, Foxtons is London’s number one real estate agency brand with more than 60 interconnected offices. Setting the standard in real estate agency, Foxtons is rate “Excellent” on Trustpilot. More homeowners choose Foxtons to sell their property over any other estate agency brand.

Technological innovation fuels Foxtons’ business growth, and their IT staff, led by Group Infrastructure and Security Director, Gurdip Kundi, is always looking to stay ahead of the curve and maintain a high level of service and competitive advantage.

As a large Microsoft house with an on-premises Exchange environment running Veritas Enterprise Vault, Foxtons was planning a digital transformation project. “Our plan was to migrate to Microsoft 365 and use Exchange Online,” said Kundi. But before they could begin their Microsoft 365 migration, Foxtons would need to overcome significant hurdles.

Microsoft 365 migration challenges

One of the biggest obstacles Foxtons faced was how they would migrate their email archives. “We take it upon ourselves to ensure we have all communications as a full trail. We have an in-house legal team, so they use the email archives in our email systems intensively, and it's a very important chain of communication and events for Foxtons. So, it was critical that we maintained the integrity of the data on the email platforms that were moving to the cloud.”

Beyond ensuring data integrity, Kundi was also concerned with how time-consuming the archive migration process would be. “We looked at how long it would take us manually, and the calculations that came back were exorbitant. It would take a massive amount of time. And the reliability slash confidence in getting it done manually was very difficult to pin down and guarantee.” These concerns led Kundi to investigate third-party tools.

Evaluating Microsoft 365 migration solutions

Foxtons quickly whittled down their list of potential migration solution vendors to three. “One was ruled out because it could only do half the job; it wouldn't do the mailbox migration automatically. You'd have to do the second part yourself as a business.” It then came down to two competitors. “From a commercial competitive perspective, Quest was more attractive. We had familiarity and confidence in the Quest brand. Once we spoke to the Quest team and the consultants, we were aware of how much they'd done this before and how mature the products were.”

Choosing email migration solutions from Quest

To overcome their migration challenges, Foxtons relied on Archive Shuttle, Migrator Pro for Exchange and Quest professional services.

“I had one person on my team who'd actually used Archive Shuttle before and was happy with the product and spoke about it with glowing references,” said Kundi. The email archive migration software lived up to its reputation, delivering impressive results.

With Archive Shuttle in place, Kundi and his team quickly and easily migrated 44TB of Enterprise Vault archive data to Exchange Online. Archive Shuttle helped Foxtons avoid end-user impact, maintain full audit trails and move only what was needed to reduce migration time and costs.

Using Migrator Pro empowered the team to achieve another impressive goal: migrating 1,868 on-premises Exchange mailboxes to Exchange Online. This highly automated Exchange migration tool simplified and accelerated the migration process while providing Kundi and his team with full visibility into and control over their migration.

“We didn’t have any issues,” Kundi said. “The Quest products work and migrate all the data successfully, which is fantastic. We were very happy with the project. It went very, very well.” When it comes to Foxtons’ migration success, Kundi gives credit not only to the Quest solutions, but also to the Quest professional services team.  

Quest professional services

Working with experienced migration experts helps ensure the success of any digital transformation effort, and that was certainly the case at Foxtons. “The Quest team was very good,” Kundi said. “They were hand in hand with us. We had very good touch points with the project team, and they were very good in communications. I can't speak highly enough about them. They answered any questions we had, any reporting queries we had. They were very quick coming back to us. We asked some complex queries and requested complex reports, but nothing was too much trouble for them.”

Kundi was impressed with the flexibility, knowledge and dedication of the Quest professional services team. “They worked out of hours, in hours and around our schedule. The Quest team was very flexible, and the value of their expertise was huge. I'd say that's what sold it above the software. When I say nothing was too much trouble, we asked them questions outside of the Quest product, around the Office 365 platform and how things are doing, stuff that wouldn't pertain to a normal migration. And again, it wasn't trouble for the team. They brought the right experts in. They gave us advice, coached us, worked with my teams, which was quite nice to see. So, the team was very flexible and adaptable rather than saying, ‘Sorry, you know what? We're only working on the migration here. Can't answer your question.’ They'd come back and say, ‘We'll find the answer.’ They were very dedicated.”

The combination of powerful migration solutions and dedicated experts enabled Foxtons to complete their migration ahead of schedule.

Accelerating the email migration process

Foxtons wanted to get the bulk of their data migrated as quickly as possible, but they hadn’t imagined just how fast their migration would go with Quest. Some competitors had told Kundi they could migrate everything in six months. Quest had conservatively estimated that the migration could be completed in half that time, but the end result was even faster. “It was two months by the time they'd done testing and everything. I was very impressed with the speed.”

The C-suite was impressed as well. “They were very happy that the migration had gone seamlessly in the background with no major issues,” Kundi said. “They were very happy about the advantages of moving to the cloud and using the hybrid environment, and also retiring that legacy infrastructure. That was a big advantage for us. Think about not having to manage an Exchange environment, being able to get rid of the archiving platforms, both from an energy perspective, as it makes us greener, and it cuts out that overhead. So, they were very happy.”

Another successful modernization project complete

“It was definitely a successful project,” Kundi said. “We’re very happy with the Quest products and the professional services team. We're sometimes very difficult to please internally at Foxtons, especially considering the advanced technology platforms and knowledge we have internally, and they wrapped it up really nicely, so it was really good to see that.”

Foxtons is looking forward to growing their use of the Microsoft 365 platform now that they’ve removed the administrative overhead of their legacy email platforms. “That’s been fantastic for the business. We can free up resources that can be better used for other elements internally,” Kundi said. With their migration project behind them, Foxtons is on track to continue setting real estate records, cementing their position as London’s leading real estate agency.