We'd love to hear from you

Founded in 2012, 21construction provides high quality fit out and refurbishment to clients and consultant teams in London and the South East of England. They specialise as main contractor for interior fit out projects as well as high quality building refurbishment work.

21construction is committed to delivering the highest quality technology and productivity tools for their business, and as such, they decided to enhance their email platform capability by migrating to a cloud-based email platform – within Office 365. The solution provided 21construction with several benefits over their existing system in terms of reliability, redundancy, scalability and storage while offering a familiar end user experience making the transition as seamless as possible.

To assist with the migration, 21construction engaged with their technology provider Urban Network, a Microsoft Silver Partner for Cloud Solutions.

Business Challenge

21construction has rapidly grown and soon found that managing various IT partners offering separate and siloed solutions was problematic. They felt unifying systems under a single cloud-based service would be the best way to increase overall efficiency, gain greater control and ensure timely service upgrades.

Moreover, with employees and contractors often working remotely on construction sites with restricted Internet access, the company wanted to improve the reliability of its communications and collaborations.

The Solutions

To ensure a smooth migration, Urban Network worked closely with 21construction’s management team, communicating the process of the staged migration from their current Hosted Exchange Service to Microsoft Office 365’s Email platform.

The migration started with an in-depth discovery phase, which led Urban Network to understand all required actions to deliver the project successfully.

Before Office 365 Email platform was deployed to the whole company, Urban Network, with the agreement of 21construction, selected some less critical mailboxes from different departments to pilot Office 365 in a test environment. This approach ensured data integrity and that the new email platform would function in 21construction’s real-world working environment.

After a successful test period, the Urban Network team started the migration process without further disruption to 21construction’s day-to-day operations.

The entire email migration to Office 365 took just one month to complete.

Business Results

By moving to Office 365, 21construction improved the mobility of its construction site workers with access from virtually anywhere to email and data across multiple devices. The company saves time by managing all these systems in one place while having a single point of contact for all their IT systems.

Once the new email platform was up and running, Urban Network also suggested standardising email signatures using another cloud-based solution ‘Exclaimer’. Exclaimer allows 21construction to centrally design and manage email signatures for all staff and ensure that every user has the correct corporate identity in their email from all devices (including smartphones, tablets and Macs).