A food group operates across several locations and also sells dairy outside Poland, so its work rests on two things: email and documents. An order, a specification, an export document, a partner confirmation. When all of that lives on local servers in different branches, each day works until something breaks.
The starting point
Email ran on local servers, separately in several branches. Over the years each location built up its own habits: a different address format, different rules for creating accounts, a different place for documents. Commercial files sat on network shares and local drives, and the same specification could circulate in three versions across attachments. Backup existed only for part of the data, and nobody checked whether anything could actually be restored from it.
Why it was urgent
In trade and export, losing correspondence is not a technical nuisance but the loss of a record of what was agreed with a partner. On top of that came credibility: messages going out from inconsistent addresses across branches looked weak on the other side, and some landed in spam. The group wanted one environment, but set a hard condition: trade must not stop for a single day.
How we ran the rollout
We started with an inventory, not with technology. We counted mailboxes, data and accounts in every branch, and only that list revealed the scale of the cleanup: duplicate accounts, ownerless network shares, data nobody had opened in years. Some of it simply did not need migrating.
The Microsoft 365 migration itself we split into waves, branch by branch. Each wave got its own window outside trading hours, and we synchronised the mailboxes in the background a few days ahead. That left only a short final sync at cutover, rather than moving everything at once. After each wave we compared the message count against the starting state before moving on.
In parallel we put identity in order in Entra ID: one address format for the whole group, one login for email and documents, multi-factor authentication on every account. Commercial documents went into SharePoint in a structure that mirrors real work, meaning partners, orders and export documentation, rather than a copy of the old mess in a new place.
Finally we covered everything with independent Microsoft 365 backup and daily recoverability checks. We ran a test restore of a single file and a whole mailbox together with the group’s IT team, so they knew how it works in practice before it was ever needed for real.
What changed
All 365 seats work in one environment, with one login and a shared place for documents. No wave required stopping trade, and the team reported no lost correspondence. Correspondence with partners now goes out from consistent addresses in the group’s domain, which improved deliverability on its own.
The biggest change, though, is less visible: the group now knows where its data is and that it can be restored. Instead of several local worlds, each running its own way, there is one environment with access control and a tested backup.