Office 365 Rescue for a Hampshire Business

JLawrence Photography is a photography business based in Southampton, Hampshire. Providing photography services for weddings, events and live music, providing a professional and reliable customer service is a key part of the business. Dynamics Consultants helped the business with moving their Office 365 licenses away from Go-Daddy and improve the features that they received by changing the licensing offered.

The Relationship with Go-Daddy

JLawrence Photography had purchased domains through Go-Daddy and had been up sold Office 365 as part of the transaction. However, their owner had not realised that there are a few downsides to buying through this vendor. From a functionality point of view, some of the licenses on offer from Go-Daddy are priced similarly to the direct from Microsoft price, but do not offer all the features of the equivalent product.

This caused them to look for alternative suppliers of Office 365 to see what was on offer. However, it proved more difficult than first expected. In most cases, moving from one partner to another is very simple – the new supplier sends a link to a confirmation that they will be the new supplier – something that can be as quick as minutes to transfer. In some situations, as with Go-Daddy, their Office 365 is provisioned on a siloed system, hence having different license options to the standard Microsoft SKUs. It is actually not possible to simply migrate an account from them to another partner.

Luckily Dynamics Consultants were here to help, understanding what is required to make the move.

Transferring the account away from Go-Daddy

The process was a number of steps as summarised:

• The first step was to make a backup of everything, including the Outlook inboxes. This is not just good practise, but a necessary part of the process, as the original account would have to be deleted.
• We set up a free Office 365 trial against the owners’ private email address. All of the back-ups were restored to this account.
• As well as cancelling the account from Go-Daddy, the owner had to contact them to disassociate the domain.
• Once the domain was free from the original Office 365 account, Dynamics Consultants set up the new account with the DNS settings to associate the domain to the account.
• As the trial drew to an end, the licenses were purchased and applied to the user accounts.

Although the amount of down time can be several days, due to the process and the fact that the disassociation and DNS applications happened quickly, the downtime was minimal.

Partnership – Working as Part of Your Team

Dynamics Consultants works as if we were part of your company, so that we become a reliable member of your team. This includes choosing the best options for your business strategy, rather than just trying to make as much money as possible!

“The initial deal from Go-Daddy seemed to make life easy, but actually we were getting less than if we had gone for standard Microsoft licenses. Having struggled for months with a way of moving away from Go-Daddy, Dynamics Consultants came to my rescue and made the transition relatively painless. As a small business in a tough industry, customer service is very important, and the possibility of many days of downtime was crippling. Through DC I kept things up and running and am now getting a full experience with Office 365, including using OneDrive storage and Forms.” Owner, JLawrence Photography

If you are unhappy with the service you are getting with your Office 365 account and would like help moving partner, getting more support or would like training on getting the most out of your system, why not contact our friendly and helpful team?

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Jesse Lawrence

Jesse is our marketing manager, keeping an eye on the latest news in the market as well as having worked on the GDPR legislation.