01 The Problem
An 8-attorney law firm in Santa Monica was running Microsoft Exchange 2016 on an aging Dell PowerEdge server in a closet. The server was out of warranty, running low on storage, and had no redundancy — a single drive failure would have taken down email for the entire firm. Their IT guy had retired 6 months prior and no one had touched the server since. They also needed to meet California Bar Association data retention requirements.
02 Our Approach
We planned and executed a full migration to Microsoft 365 Business Premium over a weekend. We migrated 11 mailboxes (totaling 180 GB), preserved all historical email, configured Azure AD with MFA for all users, set up SharePoint for document collaboration, and configured retention policies to meet Bar Association requirements. We also deployed Intune MDM on all firm devices and trained staff on Teams and OneDrive. The old server was securely decommissioned with certified data destruction.
03 The Result
Zero downtime during migration — attorneys arrived Monday morning to fully functional email and a new SharePoint intranet. MFA blocks unauthorized access. Retention policies are automated and compliant. Monthly cost: $22/user for M365 licensing + our managed plan. The firm has had zero email outages in the 4 months since migration, compared to 3 outages in the prior 6 months on the old server.