How Leeds Rhinos Rebuilt Its IT Around Microsoft Teams and SharePoint

Key Takeaways

• Leeds Rhinos, a professional rugby league club founded in 1870, rebuilt its IT infrastructure around Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to enable flexible, remote working across the organisation.
• The project was led by managed IT provider Zenzero, and was designed for future scalability rather than as a reaction to a single failure or deadline.
• Rob Oates, the club’s Managing Director, described the process as running without friction: “It couldn’t have run smoother.”
• The nearest comparison in this publication’s archive is Age UK Ealing, a charity that moved onto the same Microsoft 365 stack, but under the forcing deadline of Windows 7’s end of support.
• Read together, the two cases show the same collaboration stack solving two different problems: Leeds Rhinos modernised ahead of need, Age UK Ealing modernised because it had run out of runway.

TLDR

• Leeds Rhinos needed to move away from outdated, restrictive IT systems that were limiting how flexibly staff could work and how easily teams could collaborate across the club’s various sites. Zenzero rebuilt the club’s infrastructure around Microsoft Teams for communication and SharePoint for document management, with an explicit brief to make the environment modern, flexible and ready to scale as the club grows.
• The published case study doesn’t attach a percentage or a pound figure to the result, which is unusual for this publication’s archive of IT modernisation stories. What it does report is qualitative but specific: staff can now collaborate and access business resources from any location, and the club’s Managing Director, Rob Oates, called the entire process frictionless.
• Age UK Ealing, a UK charity covered previously on this site, ran a comparable migration onto Microsoft’s collaboration stack, but for a different reason: its Windows 7 desktops and on-premise server were running out of vendor support, not out of headroom. The charity added multi-factor authentication, device management through Intune, and went on to achieve Cyber Essentials accreditation, layers the Leeds Rhinos case study doesn’t mention.
• Set side by side, the two projects make the same underlying point from opposite directions: a UK organisation moving onto Teams and SharePoint isn’t really buying software, it’s buying the ability to work from anywhere without rebuilding the business case every time circumstances change, whether that change is a growth ambition or a support deadline.

Professional sports clubs don’t usually make the case-study pages of managed IT providers, which is what makes Leeds Rhinos’ published account of its own IT rebuild worth reading closely. The club, founded in 1870 and based in Leeds, West Yorkshire, runs a rugby league operation alongside a significant community development programme, both of which depend on staff being able to work and collaborate away from a single fixed office. That’s the problem the club’s IT modernisation was built to solve.

The problem: infrastructure that couldn’t keep up

According to the case study, Leeds Rhinos’ existing systems were outdated and restrictive. They limited how flexibly staff could work, made remote collaboration across the club’s various sites and departments harder than it needed to be, and slowed down access to the business resources people needed day to day. The club wanted an environment that could support flexible, remote working; seamless collaboration between teams; instant access to core resources; and, importantly, room to scale as the organisation’s needs evolved. None of that was possible on the infrastructure the club was running.

The solution: Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, built for scale

Zenzero, the managed IT provider that ran the project, focused the rebuild around two core pieces of the Microsoft 365 stack. Microsoft Teams became the club’s unified communication and collaboration layer, replacing whatever mix of email, phone and ad hoc tools staff had been relying on to coordinate across locations. SharePoint became the document management and information-sharing backbone, giving staff a single place to store, find and share files instead of scattered local copies. Around those two products, Zenzero designed what the case study describes as a modern, flexible and scalable IT environment, built specifically so the club wouldn’t have to repeat the exercise the next time its business needs changed.

The published account is light on implementation detail; it doesn’t break down a migration timeline, a device rollout, or a security layer the way some IT case studies do. What it emphasises instead is the outcome: staff can now collaborate and reach business resources from any location, productivity and operational efficiency have improved, and the club says it’s better positioned to compete and grow in what the case study calls a “digital-first business environment.” Rob Oates, Leeds Rhinos’ Managing Director, summed up the experience of the project itself rather than just its output: “We have been delighted with the outcome. We have been delighted with the process. It couldn’t have run smoother.”

How it compares: Age UK Ealing’s Microsoft 365 migration

The clearest comparison in this publication’s own archive is Age UK Ealing, a UK charity that migrated onto much of the same Microsoft ecosystem, but under a very different kind of pressure. Age UK Ealing was running Windows 7 desktops alongside an on-premise Windows SBS 2008 server, both approaching Microsoft’s end-of-support cutoff in January 2020. Its IT partner, Qlic, replaced the desktops with Windows 10 laptops fitted with hot-desk docking, migrated the on-premise Exchange server to Microsoft 365 Exchange, and moved file storage into SharePoint Online and OneDrive, the same document-collaboration product Zenzero built into Leeds Rhinos’ rebuild. Reg Parkinson, Age UK Ealing’s Head of Business Development, described a similarly smooth commissioning process: “Qlic invested enough time and effort to understand our needs and were receptive, flexible, transparent, and swift during our commissioning process.”

What sets the two projects apart is the reason each one happened. Leeds Rhinos’ migration reads as proactive: the case study frames it around future scalability and competitiveness rather than an external deadline. Age UK Ealing’s migration was reactive, forced by Windows 7 and SBS 2008 both running out of vendor support, a deadline with a fixed date attached rather than a general ambition to modernise. Age UK Ealing’s case study also names a security layer that Leeds Rhinos’ doesn’t: Azure Active Directory paired with Microsoft Intune for centralised device management, multi-factor authentication added specifically for security, and Datto Backupify plus SysPeace Server Protection for backup and intrusion detection. The charity went on to achieve Cyber Essentials accreditation, the UK government-backed cyber security certification, on the back of the migration; that accreditation and the security tooling behind it aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Leeds Rhinos account.

There’s a plausible, if unstated, reason for that gap: a rugby club’s IT estate and a charity’s IT estate carry different risk profiles, and Age UK Ealing’s timing, landing its Microsoft 365 migration just before the COVID-19 pandemic forced UK staff home, made resilience and continuity a more immediate, visible concern than it may have been for a sports club rebuilding ahead of need rather than in response to a crisis. It’s also possible the Leeds Rhinos case study simply wasn’t written to cover security tooling in the same depth. Either way, a reader shouldn’t assume the absence of a detail in one published case study means the underlying project skipped it.

What it proves

Read on its own, the Leeds Rhinos case study is a fairly ordinary account of a UK organisation moving its communication and document management onto Microsoft’s collaboration stack. Read next to Age UK Ealing’s, it becomes a more useful data point: the same underlying products, Teams, SharePoint and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem, are being deployed by very differently sized and differently pressured UK organisations for what amounts to the same reason, the ability to work and collaborate from anywhere without rebuilding the case for it later. One organisation bought that flexibility ahead of needing it. The other bought it because an end-of-support deadline left no other option. Both, in their own words, would do it again.