Overview
Migration and transformation of a complex on premise Microsoft SharePoint 2013 environment to Office 365 that included a branded intranet, the case management solution, general content, workflows, and several ad-hoc line of busines solutions.
The Challenge
The key challenges of the project were to migrate and simultaneously bring in transformation of working practices to fully benefit from the move to the cloud. The project was carried out at the same time as an office move and with the staff carrying out business as usual.
The CMA Intranet had a complex site structure in SharePoint 2013 with 54 sites and sub-sites, 2,500 site pages and 8,000 documents scattered across the intranet and EDRM sites. The CMA Case Management system comprised of multiple site collections, each with multiple sub-sites and document libraries and folders within these. A complex permission model overlaid the structure. General Content resided in multiple SharePoint sites and folders, often with multiple mandatory metadata fields and a complex permission model.
The Approach
The project required separation into multiple streams to cover the different disciplines of intranet migration, content migration, application migration, workflow migration, and business transformation and training. Each stream had an owner reporting to our project manager who ensured consistency of approach and timelines between the different streams. A just in-time approach was taking with the training so a business unit would be migrated to the new system as the same time as they attended training for the new environment.
We provided CMA with several cloud solutions that made use of low code platforms and more powerful tools like the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) so that CMA could learn about the modern technology stack and use these solutions as rough templates for building their own solutions using the same technologies.
Mike Turnbull, Technical Consultant, Transparity
The Solution
We applied a flat Office 365 information architecture and simplified the site structure down to 5 sites. We migrated and cleansed pages and documents via a staging area, and applied page properties to surface and group pages dynamically. Pages were standardised with an accessible layout, use of links and dynamic surfacing of relevant documents based on metadata.
The Case Management system utilised Office 365 groups with a simplified library structure, integration with Agresso online and Flow driving Azure automation services to provision the new cases. A night-time schedule of migrations was instigated to ensure active cases files were available during work hours.
The migration process involved business change management to simplify permissions and metadata for a flat structure and the use of an Office 365 group to be used therefore enabling the use of Teams and other Office 365 applications.
The final aspect of migration involved re-engineering multiple workflows and business applications in the cloud. A mixture of technologies was used, dependent upon the complexity and performance of the application. These included SharePoint forms, PowerApps, Flow, Nintex workflows and custom web parts.
The Result
In summary, the entire SharePoint 2013 environment was migrated on time with users trained in the new environment ready for a major office move. All content was migrated successfully, and the CMA now have an Office 365 information architecture that is simpler to engage with and ready to support the new ways of working through the adoption of new tools such as Teams and Planner.