SharePoint migration case study
Guiding Europe’s busiest port to successful SharePoint modernisation
When a UK port faced uncertainty on how to modernise its outdated SharePoint platform, our consultants stepped in with migration expertise. The key results of this project were:
Clear direction
With a detailed audit, analysis, and report, the port gained a clear view of its migration options.
Engaged users
High adoption was ensured by involving stakeholders across the business in the migration planning.
Efficiency and security
Due to the planning that went beforehand, the company was able to get full value from its new platform.
SharePoint migration consultancy: the full story
Needing to get shipshape
As Europe’s busiest ferry port and an award-winning cruise port, our client plays a crucial role in the local and international economy. At the time of contacting us, the port was using SharePoint 2007 as its central document repository. This platform hosted the port’s key workflows and its organisation-wide intranet.
However, the platform was several versions out of date. Issues around performance, functionality, and support had led the port to consider migrating to a modern SharePoint platform.
And on top of that challenge, the port’s efficiency was also hampered by disparate teams using siloed file shares. A SharePoint migration seemed like an opportunity to bring those teams onto a transparent central platform.
The need for change was clear. But lacking the internal expertise, first the port needed guidance on how to proceed for best results.
Pre-migration analysis and findings
The port approached Influential Software to benefit from our experience with similar SharePoint migration projects. It was agreed that our consultants would carry out an initial discovery phase to assess the port’s existing content.
This phase consisted of four main elements: a content audit, analysis, report creation, and migration planning.
In the content audit the port’s SharePoint sites were arranged into a thorough inventory with a variety of auditing tools. This provided data for analysis, including internal collating, assumption testing, and planning. And this in turn informed a detailed document on the existing platform and the migration options available, along with their costs and benefits. Finally came the migration planning stage, which took the form of on-site workshops with the port’s stakeholders and IT teams.
As a result of this process, the port’s IT team found itself in a position to perform its long-awaited SharePoint migration. Without the need for further external support, the port followed our detailed recommendations to successfully migrate 10 site collections containing around 600GB of content.
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Full speed ahead
As any migration expert will tell you, migrating content is the simplest part of the operation. What requires expertise is the auditing, analysis, and planning. And without the clarity provided by this stage, the migration will not be satisfactory.
In the port’s case, the careful pre-migration planning resulted in a modern platform that exceeded users’ expectations. By ensuring all the new features worked flawlessly, the port was able to make SharePoint users’ platform of choice. This resulted in information silos being broken down and increased efficiency across teams.
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