Universities Consolidate Multiple Productivity Suites

The administrative offices at the Universities of Wisconsin standardized on Microsoft 365 for email and office productivity, but users were on separate cloud environments, making it difficult for them to communicate, collaborate and share documents seamlessly.

About 60% of the UWs’ leaders and administrative staff were on one Microsoft 365 tenant, while the remaining 40% were on another.

“It was cumbersome,” recalls Chris Spadanuda, the UWs’ senior director of IT operations. “If we were collaborating on a document, and you were on a different tenant, I’d share a link. But when you clicked on that link, it wouldn’t work because you don’t have the right permissions. So, then I’d have to fix the permissions and send it to you again.”

Universities and colleges are sprawling organizations. Over time, some end up using disparate email systems and office productivity suites, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, so they find themselves paying for multiple software licenses or redundant services.

It happens for different reasons. At the University of Oregon, for example, some schools have their own IT departments, so they also have different email systems. The UWs wound up with with two Microsoft 365 tenants after some reorganization over the years.

Click the banner to learn what other universities are doing to manage their cloud environments.

Benefits of Consolidating Productivity Suites

By unifying email and productivity software, universities and colleges provide faculty, staff and students a consistent and seamless user experience. They can better communicate via email or chat, and with a common calendar, they can more easily schedule and hold virtual meetings, IT leaders say.

From an IT standpoint, a single productivity suite is easier to manage, improves security and can yield time and cost savings, they say.

“Any time there is inconsistency and duplication, there are costs that are often hidden,” says IDC Group Vice President Ashish Nadkarni. “It’s like maintaining two different houses. You are not going to use both houses to the fullest. You’re going to have a situation where you’re wasting money.”

Consolidation Keeps Universities of Wisconsin Running Smoothly

The UWs’ consolidation effort was just for the system’s administrative offices. The 13 universities operate their own office productivity software, so they were not part of the project, Spadanuda says.

Before moving to a single Microsoft 365 tenant in April 2024, Spadanuda and his team took about six months to plan and test the migration to make sure they did it right. They could not afford any missteps because email, collaboration and productivity tools are critical to the UWs’ business operations, he says.

For example, executives and administrative staff who needed to be migrated use SharePoint sites to share and collaborate on documents with each other and with outside users, such as staff from the university system’s 13 campuses, he says.

The project required the UWs’ IT staff to move 530 users from multiple domains to a tenant that used the Wisconsin.edu domain. About 350 users from various administrative departments were already on the target tenant.

The UWs turned to CDW to assist with the migration, and the system’s IT department collaborated with CDW engineers on the project. “We mapped out what needed to move, got migration paths planned out, tested them and went live in April,” Spadanuda says.

To simplify the migration, CDW engineers and the UWs’ IT team prestaged as much of the migration as they could so that the go-live effort would come off without a hitch, says CDW Senior Consulting Engineer George Talbert.

They created new user accounts on the target tenant. Weeks before the cutover, they used a Quest Software migration tool to begin moving terabytes of information, including SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, Teams, Power Platform and Power BI data, he says.

During the weekend of the cutover, they used a mapping spreadsheet that housed information on each user, so they could reset permissions and group memberships to ensure users could access all of their email and documents, Talbert says.

Today, the UWs is reaping the benefits. The administrative staff no longer has problems sharing data and documents.

“The efficiency it brings to our staff members and their ability to collaborate more seamlessly than before have been huge benefits,” Spadanuda says.

Consolidating licenses to one tenant has also reduced costs, he says. IT staffers no longer have to manage two Microsoft 365 environments, and being on a single tenant allows the IT department to roll out new services more easily. The system plans to launch phone service on Microsoft Teams in the future.

“We can introduce new products and features without worrying if one tenant is the same as the other,” Spadanuda says. “Trying to keep those systems aligned all the time was a hard proposition.”

Migrating from On-Premises Email Systems to the Cloud

In the Pacific Northwest, the University of Oregon recently completed a six-year email consolidation effort that eliminated two on-premises email systems in favor of Microsoft Exchange Online, which is part of Microsoft 365.

Today, the entire campus community — 55,500 faculty, staff, students and others — use the cloud-based productivity tool.

“It’s more than email,” says Melody Riley Ralphs, UO’s associate CIO for enterprise solutions. “Going from on-premises to Exchange Online and the overall Microsoft 365 experience has helped people move into this new world of a seamless, digital work environment. It’s been transformative.”

Historically, the university ran a siloed email environment with different schools and departments operating their own email systems. Sometime around 2010, the provost saw the business value of creating a centralized email system using an on-premises Exchange service so staff can more easily schedule meetings, says Jeff Jones, UO’s director of digital work experience.

There was no mandate to adopt the system. The university administration took a “build it and they will come” approach, and by 2018, 80% of the campus was on the Exchange system with the remainder on a legacy, open-source email system.

That year, after recognizing the benefits of a cloud-based productivity suite, UO’s leaders issued a mandate to migrate away from on-premises email to Microsoft 365, Jones says.

The IT department took a phased approach. In 2019, new students, faculty and staff were onboarded to Microsoft 365. The IT department then migrated the remaining faculty and staff on the legacy, open-source email system to the university’s on-premises Exchange environment. Once that was complete, they began moving them from Exchange on-premises to Microsoft 365, he says.

Click the banner to learn how one community college migrated its phone system to the cloud.

When COVID-19 arrived, most were already using 365, but the pandemic delayed the project. In 2024, the university completed the consolidation effort by moving the remaining users — visiting faculty, contractors, temporary staff, retirees and others — to the cloud.

Overall, moving email to the Microsoft cloud has reduced the burden on IT staff and bolstered security, Ralphs says.

“With Microsoft 365, we get a more robust and more highly available service than we can provide here on campus,” Jones says. “We don’t have to worry about upgrading the hardware, patching servers and backing up data — and that’s huge.”

Cloud-Based Productivity Suite Streamlines Project Management 

Cloud-based productivity tools can serve as a catalyst to consolidate workflows and project management.

Southern New Hampshire University didn’t need to consolidate email because it standardized on Microsoft 365. But in 2017, it desperately needed to consolidate disparate project management tools and create uniform project management processes. SNHU used Microsoft 365 to do it.

At the time, project managers in different university departments worked in silos. They used software tools from different vendors to manage their projects, making it difficult for various departments to collaborate, share files, assign tasks and track progress. That also made it hard for university leaders to keep tabs on their efforts, recalls Kurt Mithoefer, SNHU’s assistant vice president of strategic portfolio management.

“A lot of teams were doing great work, but there wasn't a lot of awareness across departments of what all was happening,” he says.

To create a consistent project management process, SNHU deployed Microsoft 365 tools — specifically, Microsoft Teams, the Power Platform and Microsoft Project, which is now part of Microsoft Planner.

The Microsoft ecosystem, with its integrated suite of tools, makes it easy to create standard processes and workflows for project management, says Chris Von Pichl, SNHU’s senior director of operational processes and systems.

“The beauty of what we did is, instead of picking one application and forcing everybody to commit to that, we built it through Teams,” he says. “That not only enables collaboration and chat but also allows for sharing files through different elements of the suite, such as OneNote, PowerPoint, Excel and Word.”

The university uses Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) as a workflow management tool to create projects and gain approvals, Mithoefer says. SNHU also uses Microsoft Power Apps as a central data dashboard, and Power BI for running reports.

SNHU continually improves its project management processes, but by standardizing on Microsoft 365 tools, different departments can now better collaborate on projects while leadership gains near real-time insight on their efforts, says Lori Lavallee, SNHU’s senior director of project and portfolio management.

“It brings everything to the next level, and we can work more holistically than we could before,” she says.