Automotive aftermarket giant Sonsio, enlists Insentra for a successful migration of 2TB of data to SharePoint Online

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OVERVIEW

Sonsio, one of the largest US administrators of warranty products and providers of services related to the automotive aftermarket, was searching for a Partner to conduct a migration of their current Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 environment into SharePoint Online -including over 2TB of unstructured data divided across 205 sites.

With the legacy system no longer supported by Microsoft, they were under significant time pressure to conduct the migration while minimising the impact to business operations and user experience.

In addition, Sonsio identified a need for increased security within the environment and wanted to further utilise the many benefits SharePoint online offers from a security perspective. The client teamed up with one of Insentra’s many US-based partners to carry out this project.

ONBOARDING AND DISCOVERY

Insentra recommended a structured approach to the engagement, starting with a kick-off workshop to agree on the timeline, milestones and success criteria. One of the primary drivers behind the project was the need for increased security; one of the many benefits of using SharePoint Online. The security criteria included, but was not limited to:

• Administrator access based on location
• Control access from unmanaged devices
• Sign out from active devices
• Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)

Another critical factor to the project was the old system (WPP 3.0) which was no longer supported. Unsupported legacy systems can have a negative business and user impact, causing a variety of issues such as document transfer/saving/downloading failures, connectivity and support issues etc should any major outages occur. The implementation of SharePoint Online simplified data handling and access security, which was key for a business handling a lot of client documentation.

After the planning workshop Insentra created a migration plan, covering the prerequisites of the project and to ensure the process was thoroughly documented with defined responsibilities for all parties. There was a large volume of data which needed to be migrated from over 200 different libraries, making thorough planning a crucial contributor to the success of the project. However, the client was confident in Insentra’s ability to deliver this migration, due to our proven experience and success migrating large volumes of data across a number of migration projects.

Insentra selected ShareGate as the migration tool allowing an efficient syncing process prior to the cutover. During the assessment phase, the ShareGate pre-migration analysis allowed us to confirm the readiness of the environment prior to the migration. This was achieved by running the toolset in discovery mode to ensure the process would run smoothly (with limited issues) by confirming access to the source environment.

DELIVERY

Moving into the build phase, Insentra’s team provisioned the target SharePoint site, configured the end state features and changed the tenant level settings as required. Next, we commenced the pre-migration and validation of sites into SharePoint Online, which would allow the client to log in to the new sites and verify the environment. This stage took the most time because the client had such a large number of sites and documents to validate. A few synchronisation and remediation activities were identified and rectified before we were comfortable most of the data could be migrated accurately.

Once the validation was complete and sign off was received and mutually agreed by all parties we moved into the migration phase. Insentra were now in a position to set the final cutover date, where Sonsio’s old site was formatted to ‘read only’ and all users were directed to the new SharePoint Online site.

Setting users up for success is always the key next-step for a migration, and is achieved primarily through communication:

Sonsio engaged with Insentra to migrate an on-premise SharePoint environment to SharePoint Online and Office 365. From project kick-off to closure, the project was professionally run. The Insentra team provided subject matter experts who were engaged throughout. It was a pleasure to work with the team [and] Sonsio would definitely work with Insentra on future projects”

- Project Manager / Sonsio

THE OUTCOME

Insentra performed the cutover across a weekend to allow enough time for any new data which had been added to the libraries since the validation phase to sync into the new SharePoint Online site, before the users came online on Monday. The client also made themselves available for testing and validation over the weekend to ensure everything was working as it should.

One of the benefits of having a global team meant Insentra could work across different time zones, and by the time the client came online in the US on Monday morning, our Australian team had enough time to validate the synchronisation and ensure everything was working as expected. As the cutover performed well, user impact was minimal and the migrated data was intact, therefore we could confidently go ahead and decommission the old server knowing the migration had been successful, achieving the final milestone and critical success factors for the engagement.

This was an excellent experience and outcome for Sonsio, their IT partner and Insentra, across a detailed and time sensitive project. Service Excellence was at the centre of our teams’ delivery throughout this project, and has helped Insentra to build a long, and lasting relationship with Sonsio and their IT partner.