New intranet for the Royal Albert Hall
Solution Summary
Opened in 1871, the Royal Albert Hall is a world-famous concert hall in South Kensington, London. The Hall is a registered charity which promotes the Arts and Sciences and hosts over 400 shows per year by some of the world’s greatest artists.
Royal Albert Hall turned to Intelogy with a request to migrate their existing SharePoint 2010 content across to SharePoint Online. Intelogy exceeded expectations by designing a new engaging modern intranet solution in SharePoint Online and migrated their content via the use of Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT). The SharePoint app will ensure staff members are able to receive notifications on their devices and will allow them to access key content from anywhere at any time. Everybody will be aware of what is happening within the organisation thanks to this Modern Workplace Solution hosted within Microsoft 365.
As an event-driven organisation, there was also a requirement to ensure information from their Event Management system was synchronised to the new cloud-based intranet portal. Intelogy was able to successfully overcome this challenge via a combined use of scheduled PowerShell tasks and Power Automate flows.
“We have worked with Intelogy over a number of years and have always been impressed by their skills, experience and flexible approach to delivering projects on time and within budget. Migrating to SharePoint Online, was an excellent opportunity for the Royal Albert Hall to continue our adoption of the Office365 platform, reducing our reliance on on-premise infrastructure whilst taking advantage of the generous licensing support Microsoft extends to registered charities.”
– Crispin Gray, Head of IT, Royal Albert Hall
Challenge
Royal Albert Hall were looking to migrate their existing on-premise SharePoint 2010 farm content to SharePoint Online. Engagement with SharePoint was limited; therefore, the main challenge was to increase user adoption of Microsoft 365 whilst providing flexibility and mobility to their employees.
Intelogy created an identical structure of their document libraries to move content into from the old environment via the SharePoint Migration Tool. This way all the files were in recognisable locations with a familiar structure, whilst having all the benefits of being in the new system.
One of the core functionalities of their existing SharePoint 2010 environment was a synchronised Event Calendar, in which list items were imported from a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) server and interpreted by a scheduled PowerShell script.
Each list item also contained a link back to the original report data. It was very important to ensure this functionality could be replicated and maintained in the new environment.
Solution Strategy
Intelogy introduced a Modern Workplace solution by designing a new visually appealing user interface with all the core features of SharePoint. Through combined effort with the Royal Albert Hall we identified which content needed to be migrated. Intelogy then planned a migration to move all the data from SharePoint 2010 across to the new online environment. First, we created a SharePoint Online communications site which would be used to house the migrated content.
Throughout an open dialog with the business we ascertained both their functional and non-functional business requirements and mapped these to their new solution. Intelogy ran a series of initial data migrations during the process of provisioning Royal Albert Hall’s environment, followed by a delta-migration shortly before the switch-over to ensure that the new system was both fully populated and up to date.
To replicate Royal Albert Hall’s event synchronisation functionality, Intelogy updated the existing PowerShell Script and supplemented it with Power Automate to provide the same level of functionality after migration.
To address the issue of unsupported legacy features associated with SharePoint 2010, we worked with Royal Albert Hall to analyse their importance and identify alternative features which would replace and provide similar functionality.
Intelogy introduced the Royal Albert Hall to Microsoft Search and all its powerful capabilities. This search platform facilitated the overall M365 experience as it became much easier to find files, data and answers to frequently asked questions. Search results would be customised based on whatever is happening within the organisation and on previous activity in Microsoft 365.
Results
Intelogy successfully upgraded Royal Albert Hall to a visually appealing Modern Workplace solution hosted in Microsoft 365 by migrating their existing content seamlessly into the new structure. This new Intranet suited their needs, met all their requirements and the ease of content consumption was significantly increased. SharePoint Online enabled them to use enhanced event-features and provided a visually appealing interface which drove user adoption and increased engagement. Empowering their users to have the ability to access information from any device anywhere was highly welcomed.
By moving to the cloud, Royal Albert Hall has reduced reliance upon physical assets in the form of a SharePoint farm. This move has therefore placed them in a position to benefit from reduced expenditure of effort and cost associated with local hardware, software and maintenance.
