Migrating to the Cloud Through an Individualized Approach

Working with an industry-leading specialty manufacturing company to migrate thousands of files to Microsoft Office 365.

Introduction

With tens of thousands of files spread across hundreds of folders in multiple network file shares, collaboration and maintenance within each department—as well as the organization as a whole—was becoming cumbersome and inefficient. Our customer came to Abel Solutions, looking for a partner to help plan and migrate all existing files to Microsoft Office 365. 

Moving Beyond the “Lift and Shift” Migration Approach

Before the migration could take place, Abel Solutions worked with each of the customer’s departments, via a series of pre-migration structuring sessions, to determine data governance and owner guidelines as well as map years of unstructured data to its respective department. Further, an optimal organizational structure was designed for presenting the data in their new cloud environment. Abel Solutions then worked alongside each department to organize their content into three distinct groups, as defined during the pre-migration structuring session, in preparation for the migration:
  1. Public-facing content – available to all departments within the organization and set to Read-Only.
  2. Private content – restricted to only the department who owned it and used for collaboration within the department team.
  3. Archive content – anything older than seven years and deemed no longer relevant.

Delivering a Customized Migration

Based on the vast quantity of data making up this migration effort, a phased approach was necessary—primarily due to the upload bandwidth limits imposed by Microsoft. Abel Solutions worked with each department independently, which allowed the application of the overall customer migration guidelines wile also accommodating for each department’s individual needs. Each department then went through a pre-migration data analysis in which Abel Solutions prepared risk reports outlining on-premises data that would likely need manual intervention during the migration.  Finally Abel Solutions performed the migration and turned over the data to the department.

A Modern Look to the Future

This file migration to Microsoft Office 365 also introduced our customer to the “modern” SharePoint Online experience, including a flatter hierarchy and modern document sets, as opposed to the traditional folder structure that is the standard with network file shares.  The next steps for this customer include continued progress toward a fully “modernized” solution, including the implementation and adoption of Microsoft Teams as well as process automation for more streamlined and efficient collaboration as they look to maximize their investment in the cloud.

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