SharePoint Intranet Upgrade Resulting in Improved Performance and Information Security

Client

The Client is a US-headquartered international IT company that delivers custom software solutions and provides professional IT consulting and IT outsourcing services for businesses all over the world.

Challenge

The Client used their SharePoint 2013-based corporate intranet actively as a unified collaboration hub and a central document and workflow management system ensuring the company’s daily business processes and supporting uninterrupted employee collaboration. With SharePoint 2016 released, the company decided to upgrade their intranet. Switching to the newest version of the platform, the Client wanted to benefit from numerous advantages, including the solution’s better performance, improved data protection, the possibility to adapt the intranet to mobile devices and more.

Solution

Throughout more than 9 years of SharePoint consulting and development, ScienceSoft has gained a solid experience of migrating SharePoint-based solutions of different scale and complexity.

Our team started the SharePoint migration project with assessing the current state of the intranet: our experts analyzed the Client’s SharePoint farm, content databases, assessed the customization level of the intranet and examined custom solutions that could require additional setting after the migration.

The analysis performed by the SharePoint team allowed the specialists to draw up the migration plan and start the project’s active phase. The project was divided into several stages in order to enable a step-by-step migration of the intranet content and solutions without interrupting the company’s daily business processes.

The team created the backups of all content databases to ensure data safety and used Windows PowerShell to export the solutions. ScienceSoft paid particular attention to the migration of such vital solutions as a contract management system and quality management system that contained a large number of custom features. All custom workflows within those systems were migrated with SharePoint Designer 2013.

The marketing and sales site collection was migrated separately to ensure a correct transfer of all materials and keep the integration with the Client’s website. A deeply customized home page of the intranet was migrated with no deviations in functionality and design.

At the final stage, SharePoint developers collaborated with a Client’s SharePoint administrators to migrate SharePoint MySites, configure them properly, activate files of custom solutions, adjust authentication issues and fix log errors. The administrator’s involvement was also required to ensure the intranet integration with a customer relationship management system and a corporate project management system.

Results

ScienceSoft fulfilled the SharePoint migration project within the planned timeframe and budget. The upgraded intranet shows a much better performance. Particularly, employees highly appreciated an improved page response time. Furthermore, the upgraded intranet now allows users to:

• Work effectively with large files and benefit from the improved sharing capabilities.
• Access the intranet from mobile devices to collaborate with colleagues remotely.
• Work with sensitive information safely owing to the improved security features and data loss prevention mechanisms. Moreover, the enhanced security became a great advantage for the Client’s SharePoint administrators, as they can control the exchange of sensitive data permanently.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2016, MS SQL Server 2014, Windows PowerShell, REST, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SharePoint Designer 2013.