SharePoint Upgrade for Global Manufacturing Firm

Overview

Our client, a global manufacturing firm based in the Midwest, needed to upgrade its SharePoint environment from Windows Server 2003 / SharePoint 2007 to the current release. The company relies on SharePoint as the backbone of its product lifecycle management processes. Our client sought our assistance to ensure a smooth migration, effective organizational change management and a brand-new modern user interface.

The need to upgrade was pressing, given security concerns of running in a non-supported mode as well as problems with the existing environment such as lack of a working search function. The organization had long recognized the need but had experienced a couple false starts internally on projects to handle the upgrade.

Solution

We applied our proven approach to ensure success. The phases included design planning, build, implementation, testing, and go-live. Our project team included a project manager, a business analyst, and a SharePoint architect. We applied an agile process that included standup meetings two to three times a week—and daily as the go-live date approached.

Specific needs with this upgrade included:

• Ensure multiple custom applications connected to the system continued to operate
• Keep the same URLs to ensure hard-coded links continued to function
• Enable search functions some legacy file shares and Lotus Notes data
• Migrate 2 TB of data
• Upgrade the user interface

The project resulted in a SharePoint 2016 environment with a user-friendly UI—which users at our client tested as part of the process, helping to pave the way for successful user adoption.

The project progressed smoothly through each of the phases we planned and wrapped up on time and within budget.