This piece was contributed by BitTitan’s Grady Gausman. 

In July 2019, BitTitan introduced new features to its flagship cloud office migration solution, MigrationWiz, to support the transition of a Microsoft Teams instance between Office 365 tenants. While months of scoping, engineering, and testing went into the development of this new migration scenario, BitTitan reached out to New Signature as a close partner and frequent MigrationWiz user to participate in an early beta program.

In a recent interview, BitTitan Product Manager Merlin Woodman talked about New Signature’s role in the release of that feature, the invaluable feedback the team provided, and how this effort gives New Signature a leg up on other partners when it comes to Teams migration projects.

What role did New Signature play in the testing of new Teams features for MigrationWiz?

We engaged New Signature early in our beta program, first for internal testing and then later a project delivered for an actual customer once we got some of the initial bugs figured out. Throughout the course of the project, Andrew and Sheldon from your team provided lots of great feedback that drove our roadmap and helped troubleshoot before a full launch.

What is the biggest benefit to having partners like New Signature test features before they are fully released?

Having trusted partners like New Signature, who know our tools front and back, provides several benefits. The feedback loop is really tight, meaning we get a lot of great information early in the release process and identify any problems that may have been left out of the initial build. It helps to have people outside our organization looking at the same problem and asking questions about how we’ve decided to solve it. The end result is a better experience for our partners and their customers.

Did the testing with New Signature uncover anything specific? What was the outcome?

Andrew Glasser and Sheldon McGruder’s help with beta testing uncovered a few areas of improvement. Built into our Teams solution is a Source assessment to help partners understand the number of users, amount of data, and other metrics to help scope the project and understand licensing. They provided specific feedback about that assessment time and the migration phase customizability. We ended up implementing a couple of those improvements before launch and continue to work on other suggestions. Getting this feedback early in the process helped us get a head start and include that work in upcoming sprints so we can ship faster and improve support for the entire scenario.

Does participating in this testing help the New Signature team with Teams migrations?

Absolutely. Teams adoption is growing extremely fast and on the migration front, we’re likely to see a big uptick in this scenario as more organizations increase usage of the application. Testing new features early in the release cycle and thinking through these problems with us gives New Signature a great deal of experience with a workload that’s going to become a required item in future Office 365 tenant moves. Not many partners have Teams migration projects under their belts, leaves New Signature in a great spot to win future business.

Quote from Merlin:

“Working with Modern Workplace leader Jim Banach, along with Andrew, and Sheldon at New Signature was really beneficial for us at BitTitan. They spent the time to understand how we built the feature and provided candid feedback on areas that we could improve, which led to a better customer experience and informed our future roadmap. We’re grateful to have close partners like New Signature!”