YMCA Fairthorne Group Case Study
The YMCA Fairthorne Group (YMCAFG) is a leading community charity that delivers services across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Formed in 2002 through the merger of two existing YMCA’s, the YMCAFG has grown consistently year on year. The organisation now works with more than 40,000 children, young people and other family members, in 14 different communities, on nearly 30 sites and operational bases.
The challenge
The YMCAFG were looking for an IT partner who could support them on their digital transformation journey – moving away from a legacy Citrix platform to a more modern, flexible and cost-effective service in the Microsoft Cloud.
Project challenges
We faced a number of challenegs while implementing this project, in particular:
The YMCAFG had served notice on the hosted and support services of their previous provider, meaning we had just three months to plan and deliver this solution.
Transition of services had to be delivered in conjunction with the installation of new internet connections that was managed by SCS Communications.
The YMCAFG could not afford for systems to be unavailable for sustained periods of time.
The solution
The solution we put forward to address the YMCAFG’s requirements was innovative and disruptive: a full migration away from on-premise to the Cloud. We migrated YMCAFG’s email and SharePoint site from hosted to online services using Microsoft Office 365. The Domain Controller services and line of business application were also migrated to an Azure environment, which can be scaled to meet the charity’s future requirements. Skype for Business was introduced as a new service (as part of YMCAFG’s Microsoft Office 365 subscription) providing different methods of communicating and collaborating within the organisation.
