27,000 users and 3.5TB of data migrated to Office 365 following merger

Over 3.5TB of data and 27,000 users migrated to Office 365 from BPOS following an acquisition of a major power business.

Challenge

After a world leader in power generation made an acquisition to achieve its vision to deliver one of the most comprehensive offerings in the energy sector, the separation and migration of 27,000 users and over 3.5Tb of SharePoint content needed to be carried out from a dedicated Microsoft BPOS tenancy hosted in Europe across to a dedicated Office 365 tenancy in the US.

Solution

Following years of proven experience with leading migration software tools such as ShareGate, Intelogy was engaged to plan and execute the migration.  With over 700 site collections to be migrated, comprising collaboration spaces and publishing sites, careful analysis led to the authoring of a PowerShell script library which handled further analysing, batching and execution of migration jobs based on a defined priority and complexity model.  This provided flexibility, ensuring shorter migration windows and minimal impact to the business.

The approach involved 12 ShareGate migration workstations, hosted in Microsoft Azure to provide a scalable migration farm that facilitated the transfer of data from BPOS-D across to Office 365 using Azure storage accounts and the Office 365 migration API.  The toolset was extended using PowerShell to carry out pre and post-migration tasks, reducing the effort and risk of competitive tasks, whilst meeting the demands of the project.

Further PowerShell scripts were authored to continually report on the progress of the migration based on migration job progress and comparative analysis of source and target environments.  Reports were surfaced using a SQL Server Reporting Services dashboard, providing complete transparency for project stakeholders that allowed them to quickly and efficiently make informed decisions with all relevant information at hand.

Benefits

The scale and intensity of the project meant the team encountered challenges along the way, but the shared goal between both Intelogy and our client meant the project maintained positive momentum and successful delivery was achieved.  The project provided the foundation for SharePoint Online use and modern collaboration across the business and complemented their on-going roadmap of cloud computing, allowing users to take full advantage of additional productivity features only available in Office 365.  Intelogy played an integral part in moving our client to SharePoint Online and enabling them to use the enhanced feature sets and modern interfaces for the benefit of the organisation.