Tyman PLC and Syntax Case Study

Syntax was selected as the partner to assist Tyman with Office 365, Azure & SSO. Managing, designing, planning and implementing Office 365, to migrate approximately 850 users in the first stage and a further 500 users in a second stage. Syntax undertook an analysis phase to understand the IT environments within the business to make recommendations on the types of migration strategy.

Tyman PLC (Tyman) is a leading international supplier of building products to the door and window industry. They operate industrial manufacturing businesses with significant operations in nine separate countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australasia. Tyman’s manufacturing divisions throughout the UK and Ireland operate under ERA brand, while Europe the Middle East and Australasia operate under the Giesse and Schlegel brands. In North America, the company is known as Amesbury Truth.

Solution

Initial Project

Syntax was selected as the partner to assist Tyman with managing, designing, planning and implementing Office 365, working in partnership initially with the IT teams at Grouphomesafe and Schlegel to migrate approximately 850 users. Syntax undertook an analysis phase to understand the IT environments within the business and gain a better understanding of the email usage, storage volumes and the configurations of the servers. This enabled Syntax to make recommendations on the types of migration strategy and provide estimates on how long the migration would take.

The next stage was the production of a detailed design and project plan. This was required to document the existing server configurations and email flow, and determine the individual tasks (and responsibilities) that had to be completed to ensure a successful migration. The project was complex due to the distributed locations and mixed environment, and the individual business units needed to operate email effectively while the migration was taking place. Syntax carried out a staged Office 365 migration and deployed third-party tools to ensure that co-existence was maintained throughout the migration phase. The Tyman, Grouphomesafe, and Schlegel businesses were migrated individually in a planned sequence, with existing email, calendars and contact information moved to the Office 365 platform in order to maintain the integrity of user data.

Global Integration

After the initial project, Tyman acquired Amesbury and Truth in North America. The next stage was to integrate their Exchange messaging infrastructure and migrate another 550 users to Office 365. Our project team worked with the Amesbury and Truth teams to understand their environment and map-out the best migration strategies. This also involved defining the roles for the migration so that Syntax could call upon local IT resources to carry out pre-migration activities in preparation for the project commencement. On completion of the AmesburyTruth project, Tyman acquired Giesse – a specialist aluminium window and door manufacturer based in Budrio, Italy. The project team carried out the same Office integration process in Italy for approximately 600 additional users.

Azure & Single Sign-on

With the group fully migrated to Office 365 and with all users and domains in a single tenant, the group was starting to reap the benefits of improved communication and collaboration. The next stage of the project was to look at identity, and how users could enjoy single sign-on (SSO) to access any of the applications, plus the ability for self-service password resets. Key to the requirement was the ability to offer SSO without having to use a portal interface. Syntax designed and implemented a group Azure AD environment, with ADFS servers that could federate identity between on premise Active Directory, Azure, and any web based applications. Syntax utilised the functionality of Azure AD Premium to provide the self-service password reset capability.