The Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (CAOT) is the national voice for more than 11,000 occupational therapists across Canada. Headquartered in Ottawa, the association has 35 staff members distributed from coast to coast, and its mission is to support and advance the practice of occupational therapy nationwide. CAOT has moved to a fully remote office and, to make sure it uses its budget effectively, reviews its suppliers at each contract renewal.

For years CAOT relied on a traditional hosted server infrastructure. The pandemic accelerated remote work, and staff spread from coast to coast were reaching shared drives through VPN connections that were slow and frustrating. Files were saved to a drive and attached to emails, which made collaboration harder than it needed to be.

Maintaining the hosted server was no longer cost-effective. The association was paying $8-9,000 CAD a year in server maintenance while already paying for Microsoft 365 licenses that came with ample storage and collaboration tools. The internal team built its own IT roadmap: move to the cloud, support the transition to a fully remote office and reduce reliance on VPN access and physical infrastructure.

With 35 staff and IT managed alongside membership and business development, CAOT needed help to turn that roadmap into a plan with a budget and a timeline, to execute a SharePoint migration without disrupting operations, and to bring staff along with training. It also had to justify the spend: CAOT reviews suppliers at each contract renewal and had explored other local MSPs.

CAOT brought its roadmap to Thrive, its managed service provider, and asked for help with the "how". Thrive enhanced the plan with expert insight, project coordination and dedicated technical resources, and worked with the association to set the budget and timeline for a full migration to SharePoint and Microsoft's cloud environment.

The migration was run by a dedicated Thrive project team. When one engineer did not have an answer, another expert could be pulled in immediately, a depth of bench strength that Randy St. Louis, CAOT's Senior Manager of Membership, Business Development & Information Technology, noted a smaller local provider could not have offered. The SharePoint environment replaced VPN access to shared drives with cloud-based file sharing, integrated workflows and simplified, real-time collaboration.

Recognizing that the change would be a major shift for staff used to saving files locally and emailing attachments, Thrive provided a trainer who delivered several training sessions to help staff make the most of the new tools. Thrive also spread the project cost over monthly payments, which made the modernization affordable for the association.

Support continued after go-live. Months later, CAOT still relies on key contacts at Thrive; a SharePoint question raised by St. Louis was answered with a solution within half an hour. An Active Directory migration with Thrive is now underway as the next step on the roadmap.

• Annual server maintenance costs of $8-9,000 CAD eliminated by retiring the hosted server
• Support tickets cut by over 50% since the migration, with further gains expected after the Active Directory project
• SharePoint migration expected to pay for itself within two years, with three-year IT costs lower than the old setup
• VPN frustrations replaced with cloud file sharing, autosave and real-time collaboration for a fully remote team
• Training sessions delivered by a Thrive trainer eased the adjustment to cloud working
• CAOT renewed with Thrive over lower-priced local MSPs on the strength of the project experience