As part of a data migration project for a major defense contractor, NBI successfully migrated over 30 terabytes of data from both legacy and industry-leading platforms, including SharePoint 2007– 2013, Office 365, DocuShare, eRoom, and file shares. The project not only cleaned up legacy systems that were using old, unsupported hardware and software but also saved the client over $80 million in government fees, farm costs, and operating costs. Throughout the project—from technology selection, through planning and development, right up to the execution of the migrations—NBI’s team was integrally involved in each phase. At the onset of the project, NBI’s team spearheaded a two-month discovery period to evaluate potential migration tools on cost, user experience, support services, pre- and post-migration features, configuration requirements, and technical features. NBI team members then put their decades of industry experience to use in selecting a high-functionality and cost-effective SharePoint and eRoom migration tool as the best option for the client’s needs.

SharePoint Migration Efficient Data Migration and Project Automation

Subsequently, the team set out to begin implementing project planning and development. With an undertaking of this magnitude, streamlining the project’s timeline was critical to the client’s ROI, and so NBI organized five simultaneous efforts to increase cost efficiency: requirements gathering, discovery, archiving, development, and testing. In order to maximize each team member’s strengths, all platforms involved in the migration were assigned their own team of Business Analysts, Developers, Quality Control personnel, and SharePoint experts.

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To ensure that all project requirements were planned for, NBI held discussions with stakeholders and end-users in order to gather additional source and target environment requirements before development took place, in order to adjust for all of the client’s specific needs. The team then undertook a full inventory and analysis of each source platform, utilizing automated scripts created specifically to retrieve metrics like site count, user count, document count, workflows, custom features, and custom pages. SQL tables were also implemented to manage the massive amount of inventory data. With the client’s requirements and detailed platform analytics well documented, the team categorized sites by complexity in order to productively schedule the next phase of the project, archiving. In the hands of inexperienced technologists, an archiving effort can take years. In order to streamline the process, NBI implemented automations designed to reduce the number of migrated sites through a SharePoint workflow that allowed users to add sites to an out-of-scope list that would omit migration. The migration process can still be slowed considerably by customizations such as features, applications, authentication, pages, and InfoPath forms. The team worked with site owners to generate out-of-the-box alternative methods to replicate custom functionality without having to migrate time-consuming customizations. Having honed in on the in-scope data and sites, NBI developed all the tools necessary to fill in the gaps left by Content Matrix that existed due to highly customized customer source platforms. Using their wide range of technical expertise, NBI’s team members developed toolsets to automate the migration process with features including inventory collection, branding, taxonomy, metadata, workflow data, and list customizations. In order to properly test the newly-developed migration tools, the NBI team built three separate SharePoint farms: one focused on development, another on quality assurance, and one on production. Over ten thousand test migrations were conducted to ensure the migrations were flawless, with each source platform undergoing over 100 test cases through each of the three test farms. Following project development, User Acceptance Testing was implemented, allowing real users to test the outcome of the migrations and provide feedback. Users of varying skill levels were enlisted for the task, with test scripts written to ensure all facets of the migration were thoroughly evaluated. Once testing was completed, NBI conducted the final migration in 12-hour cycles, with each cycle migrating between 50 and 150 sites. Completed cycles were then reviewed by business analysists and quality assurance personnel to ensure a proper migration had been achieved. All told, NBI successfully migrated over 25 thousand sites, 66 million files, and 180 thousand users. What’s more, the project was completed on-time and within budget, proving that NBI’s detailed and efficient approach produces quantifiable business results for our clients.

SharePoint Migration Efficient Data Migration and Project Automation