2Plus2 worked with business owner representatives across the organization to ensure that more than 250 team sites were sites were inventoried and then archived or moved to the new Office 365 environment.
With the imminent expiration of SharePoint 2007, Central Garden & Pet (CGP) needed to plan and execute a deliberate migration to Office365 and SharePoint Online during the 2017 Fiscal Year. This comprehensive projct provided CGP the opportunity to prune the current SharePoint environment down to the essentials. Several teamsites had little content and no activity for months or years. The direction was to flatten the current nested sub-site hierarchy (previous best practices) to a new "flat" site collection design that would be easer to maintain and position the company for future growth.
More than 250 sites that needed to be reviewed and catalogued.
There were several sites with custom coding that needed to be updated to current techologies to work in the new Office 365 environment.
CGP needed a partner to:
The client requested that we leverage Sharegate’s promote feature which can be used during the migration process to assist in re-architecting the site while maintaining content and not rebuilding the new site from scratch.
CGP wanted to transform their current SharePoint implementation into a forward looking Corporate Intranet Portal.
2Plus2 divided up the custom migration project into two sections: Architecture & Branding, and Specialty Sites. The Architecture & Branding was a site wide focus to build a new look and feel using Microsoft Best Practices for themes and styling. The Specialty Sites were a set of site collections with unique SharePoint customization that was analyzed for migration or replacement with similar features.
The project scope encompassed migration from SharePoint 2007 to Office365 and SharePoint Online. The project started with analysis. The original list of more than 250 sites and subsites was inventoried, analyzed and targeted into one of the following buckets: delete, archive or migrate. In some cases, migrated sites were combined or split as part of the migration.
We worked with 12 business owner representatives across the organization to ensure that all sites were reviewed properly.
2Plus2 designed the new SPO tenant space Site Collection implementation based on Microsoft best practices (which are to move sites to site collections based on your site security/permissions) ensuring a well-performing (response time) online experience. 2Plus2 developed a new brand, site themes (one dark and one light) along with a series of web parts. We established standards for content types and related metadata for documents as well as leveraging the term store for managed navigation which provides a global top navigation across all sites. SharePoint’s Content Syndication Hub stores global content types and columns that are used throughout the tenant space.
The resulting design is 40 site collections accommodating 125 sites.
The team at 2Plus2 provided expert direction in our migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online. From interviews with business owners to designing our information architecture they guided us through the design process to make sure we had a solid foundation. They provided great support as we encountered various obstacles during our migration. We are now finishing up the last migration items including specialty sites, some with custom applications. This whole migration was scheduled for a year and as we finish it we are on time and on budget. Excellent job!
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