IT System Merger and Migration for Salisbury Based Law Firms

Sampson Coward and Whitehead Vizzard, two law firms based in Salisbury, Wiltshire, were undertaking a company merger and, being the MSP (Managed Serviced Partners) for Sampson Coward. Blue Frontier were approached to engage with the two companies to perform the IT systems merger that formed part of a larger programme of work around the companies amalgamation.  

Having undertaken a number of IT systems mergers previously, we have a well-defined process that governs our activity on this type of project. The first step was to gather a clear and comprehensive picture of the IT systems in place and, as we were already supporting Sampson Coward, the details of their system was already known to us, and so we proceeded with a full audit of the Whitehead Vizzard IT systems.

The Blue Frontier IT audit covers everything from the patch status and installed software present on end-user workstations, all line of business applications, services and facilities, to the bandwidth and throughput available on the WAN infrastructure, and everything in between. This audit process results in a clear and detailed report to both parties, including a draft migration plan and associated costs.

Support From the Digital Team

Above and beyond the immediate technical challenges on premise, we also worked with our digital team to merge both websites ensuring that the merger between the two organisations was integrated into the website, with updated images and a new logo created, closely following brand guidleines at all times.

Subsequent to this, viability and compatibility checks were performed by engaging with third party software and hardware vendors to ensure that the draft migration plan was fit for purpose. Once the validation of the draft migration plan was confirmed and any process amendments made, the final costs were agreed with the client and the date for the completion of the systems merger was booked in.

Various preparatory tasks were also scheduled in prior to the switchover weekend in order to ensure that as much work as possible was conducted before, what was to be, a very busy weekend.

A Successful IT System Merger

Due to a number of technical factors, the processes for this migration were complex as they involved the manual merger of email systems, new hardware installation, service migrations, and a domain rebuild and merger – all of which meant that the weekend merger was planned to take three engineers around seventy hours from Friday evening through to Sunday evening. Despite the complexity and scale of the merger, the tasks were completed on-time and both companies were able to successfully work on Monday morning.