Agriculture body gains more value from its intranet through Office 365 migration

The challenge

SharePoint upgrade was overdue

At the time of this project, the agricultural board was using a SharePoint 2010 intranet, hosted on-premises. But with SharePoint 2010 end of life looming, the board saw it was time for a SharePoint migration.

Around half of the board’s 400 staff used the SharePoint 2010 system. The intranet’s main functions were central document management and project management. Overall, the intranet contained around 160GB of content in 11 site collections. This content included custom SharePoint Content Types and SharePoint Web Parts.

Rather than stay on-premises, the board decided to migrate SharePoint 2010 to Office 365, in the cloud. But without in-house knowledge, the board needed a team of SharePoint experts to make the migration a success.

The solution

SharePoint 2010 to Office 365 migration

Phase one: SharePoint audit

The complexity of the board’s intranet content required a phased approach. In the first phase, we carried out a full intranet inventory and audit. The use of automated tools and PowerShell scripts helped us rapidly analyse the intranet and produce a report detailing:

• custom solutions
• workflows
• content types
• site columns
• permissions
• user alerts
• users and groups
• large lists or libraries
• UI customisations
• organisational branding

With this understanding of the existing system, we were able to successfully plan the upcoming SharePoint content migration.

Phase two: SharePoint preparation

In the second phase we cleaned up the content to be migrated and prepared the new Office 365 intranet. This process consisted of:

• finding and removing “orphaned users”
• removing empty SharePoint Groups
• putting users with explicit permissions back into Groups
• deleting unused content types, site columns, and workflows
• identifying sites that were no longer needed
• finding large site collections for break-up into smaller ones
• removing unwanted versions from version history
• reorganising lists and libraries with too many columns
• rethinking and reorganising very large lists

This clean-up ensured the new intranet would be well-structured from day one.

Phase three: SharePoint content migration

In the final phase, our engineers built a cloud-based SharePoint system with the agricultural board’s fonts, logo, and colour scheme.

Once the new system was set up and configured correctly, it was time for the SharePoint 2010 to Office 365 migration. We achieved this with Metalogix Content Matrix, a powerful SharePoint content migration tool. This software enabled us to achieve a faster, less risky, and more transparent migration.

The benefits

Future-proof intranet achieved