Case Study: Bishop Auckland College expands student access to Office 365 with Phoenix Software

Based North of Darlington in County Durham, Bishop Auckland College is a further education college with over 5,000 full and part time students

Bishop Auckland College, a further education college in County Durham with more than 5,000 students, turned to Phoenix Software when its Microsoft licence renewal became an opportunity to modernize aging IT. What began as a straightforward procurement project expanded into a challenge to upgrade outdated Exchange 2003 email servers and introduce Office 365 across the college.

Phoenix Software recommended using Microsoft’s Student Advantage programme to give every student access to Office 365 at no extra cost, alongside a hybrid cloud/on-premise email solution that moved student mail to Office 365 and upgraded the remaining servers to Exchange 2010. The project was delivered in 10 days during the Christmas break, helped decommission one email server, improved reliability and functionality, and gave over 1,000 students access to Office 365 in the first eight weeks, plus 25GB of online storage and better collaboration tools.

Bishop Auckland College

Wayne Longton-Worley

Head of IT Services