Case Study: The University of Texas at Austin achieves campus-wide Office 365 migration, standardizing email for 24,000+ faculty and staff with Avanade

The University of Texas at Austin takes significant step towards its cloud-first vision

The University of Texas at Austin, a large public research university with more than 24,000 faculty and staff across 45 colleges, sought to adopt a cloud-first strategy by moving faculty and staff email and calendaring to Office 365. Early migrations encountered technical problems amplified by a highly decentralized IT environment—more than 20 different email servers, mixed device ecosystems (over 60% on Apple devices), and varied CSU requirements—prompting ITS leadership to engage Avanade for a revised approach.

Avanade and UT Austin’s ITS team stabilized the initial wave, reassessed scope, and executed a tailored migration and change-management plan that used automated tooling and close coordination with Microsoft. The effort moved more than 95% of accounts to Office 365 (with a 99.7% success rate in the second wave), standardized campus email, avoided roughly $500,000 in hardware costs, expanded mailboxes up to 50GB, improved calendaring and Mac support, and built confidence for future cloud initiatives.

University of Texas at Austin