The Golden Rain Foundation is a non-profit service provider for cooperative housing in California, specializing in the property management of cooperative retirement communities. Established as the sponsoring body of Leisure World Seal Beach, Golden Rain now also acts as trustee for corporations such as Rossmoor, a nationally recognized active senior adult community, and Laguna Woods Village, a premier Southern California community.
Compatibility Issues and High Cost Eliminated with the Help of Alvarez Technology Group
For years, The Golden Rain Foundation used GroupWise, a messaging and collaboration platform from Novell, as their email management system. As the organization grew, compatibility issues began to arise. Internal hosting became costly, requiring constant maintenance and expensive server upgrades to increase storage. Management was time consuming, and it became clear that a more mainstream system was needed.
A longtime client of Alvarez Technology Group, Golden Rain approached the company for a new email system recommendation. We discussed the needs with the Foundation and together decided it was time to make the move to the cloud. We concluded that Microsoft Office 365, a subscription based, cloud hosted email platform, was the best choice available. Alvarez Technology Group developed the project and began the migration from GroupWise to Office 365.
Leveraging the Cloud
The switch over was carefully planned and tested. We began by ensuring the success of the users, training them on the new system and answering all of their questions. Over 140 users were migrated over the weekend, and everything went smooth as silk. More than 100 gigabits of email data was transferred from the internal GroupWise server to the Office 365 cloud using www.migrationwiz.com, which automated the data move and worked flawlessly.
Since the migration to Office 365, The Golden Rain Foundation has experience significant cost saving. The organization now leverages the cloud, and has eliminated the need to upgrade the email infrastructure. There is no need for time consuming system management, and performance has been terrific.
“Alvarez Technology Group has stepped up again to assist in a very large migration. The project was smooth and painless”
– Debi Tallerico, IT Manager, The Golden Rain Foundation
The organization now has lower overhead and compatibility issues have been eliminated. Office 365 is more user friendly, so new employees are easily trained. Alvarez Technology Group is continuing to work with The Golden Rain Foundation to manage the servers and support the IT infrastructure.
