Posted 21/11/2024
The charities Breast Cancer Care and Breast Cancer Now merged in April 2019 forming Breast Cancer Now, the charity that’s steered by world-class research and powered by life-changing care. Breast Cancer Now is here for anyone affected by breast cancer, providing support for today and hope for the future.
The merger of Breast Cancer Care and Breast Cancer Now offered the chance to combine the power of care and research. The next step was to unite employees from both organisations using technology, so they could communicate and collaborate seamlessly.
The solution was to merge all users into a single Office 365 tenant – a project carried out in September 2019 by IT specialists, Nero Blanco.
As with many mergers and acquisitions, an Active Directory migration was required to effect the change in domain. But rather than switching all users from one domain to another, some required the flexibility of access to both domains simultaneously – enabling them to rebuild the business behind the scenes.
To deliver this functionality without the need for complex manual processes and scripts, Nero Blanco decided to leverage PowerSyncPro (PSP) – a clever tool designed to help organisations migrate their data with less downtime and disruption, and to save time and money in the process.
Breast Cancer Care users’ workstations were migrated to the new domain when the Office 365 migration was completed. PSP seamlessly managed the Active Directory migration for 220 user workstations while Nero Blanco synced 580 objects.
But challenges lay ahead. The migration was just a week from completion when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the UK – disrupting businesses throughout the UK and beyond – and completion of the project was delayed by a year.
As new government guidelines introduced in March 2020 meant staff at Breast Cancer Now vacated their offices to begin remote working from home, PSP remained active – ticking away happily, ensuring access to the legacy charity drives, and enabling clean-up of access to the file servers further down the line.
Only in March 2021 – when users no longer required access to the legacy system – did the team contact Nero Blanco to discuss decommissioning PSP.
“PowerSyncPro provided a seamless service in the process of uniting our two legacy charities to become Breast Cancer Now. A handful of staff needed continued access to our legacy drives as our businesses gradually united, and PowerSyncPro provided the ongoing directory sync required to provide this access.
“While it was never the intention for PSP to continue to run for over a year, we could never have foreseen the unprecedented circumstances that led to this situation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was extremely reassuring for the Breast Cancer Now IT team to know PSP was doing its thing for all those months with no interaction required – it’s incredibly good at keeping things running.“
Brigid Macdonald, Head of IT, Breast Cancer Now
