Migrating SharePoint for UK Port

Modernising CMS for Europe’s busiest port

Aerial view of a shipping port to represent SharePoint for UK Port case study

Executive Brief

Intranet migration to bring together teams

Our client is Europe’s busiest ferry port and is also an award-winning cruise port. As a result, they play an important role in the local and global economy. They sought us out to refresh and modernise their SharePoint solution. With our help, they were able to achieve the following:
Clear options
We provided a detailed audit report and analysis for the port to understand the migration options available.
Engaged users
We involved stakeholders throughout the planning stage to ensure high user adoption
Efficiency and security
With thorough planning involving the client, they were able to get full value of the new platform.

The Challenge

Getting shipshape

The client was using SharePoint 2007 as their central document repository at the time of contacting us. This platform hosted the port’s key workflows and its organisation-wide intranet. However, this version was out of date and required updating. Due to performance, functionality and support issues, the client considered migrating to a modern SharePoint version.

Additionally, the port’s efficiency was affected by teams using siloed file shares. A SharePoint migration was the perfect opportunity to bring those teams onto a centralised platform.

Importantly, the need for change was clear. However, lacking the internal expertise, the port first needed guidance on how to proceed for best results.

The Solution

Discovery and analysis pre-migration

As part of the migration process, our consultants carried 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. In turn, this informed a detailed document on the existing platform and the migration options available, along with their costs and benefits. Finally, there came the migration planning stage, which took the form of on-site workshops with the port’s stakeholders and IT teams.

Upon completion, 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.

The Results

Easy sailing with SharePoint migration

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.

For this SharePoint migration for a UK port, 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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