Case Study- Migration/NetHope
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NetHope is a nonprofit that supports humanitarian organizations through technology solutions. It migrated from SharePoint 2007 to Office 365 to better support collaboration between its 35 member NGOs and partners. With help from MetaVis, NetHope was able to migrate 25GB of content, including documents, lists, and discussions. The migration took longer than expected due to building the new system from scratch and redesigning mid-process, but MetaVis helped complete it on time by automating the migration. NetHope recommends MetaVis to simplify complex migrations to Office 365.
Case Study- Migration/NetHope
- 1. Helping you know your content Business Overview NetHope is a small, not-for-profit organization that supports the needs of humanitarian organizations which help developing countries though the smarter use of technologies and technology enabled solutions. It has a large reach in terms of membership -- 35 of the largest international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are members of the NetHope organization. CASE STUDY: NetHope Problem/Challenge: Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to Office 365 SharePoint Products: MetaVis Migration Suite Success Factors: • Moved documents, lists, calendar entries & discussions • Maintained metadata • Shortened migration time • More control and accuracy over content A lesson in Migrating and Organizing Content in Office 365 NetHope offers a range of services, such as: • Connectivity: NetHope was initially founded to bring connectivity to remote, geographically challenged areas in support of member organizations’ field operations. • Field Capacity Building: NetHope offers training and skills development to member NGOs and field staff to help them be more productive. Additionally, after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the NetHope Academy was launched to help train local interns on Microsoft and other technologies, whom members and other organizations then hire to support their field operations. The program was expanded this year to Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa. • Emergency Response: Supports a faster, coordinated response to disasters. For example, NetHope worked with a partner organization after the Haiti earthquake to build a network to allow members to get back up and running to do emergency operations and recovery activities. • Shared Services: NetHope helps members get up and running with a variety of shared back-office services. As an example, it helped members build a Shared Services Helpdesk that is now self-sustaining. • Innovation for Development: NetHope looks at what the needs are out there for planning solutions for healthcare, agriculture, education and figures out how technology can be used to come up with better ideas/ways of doing things. It’s a small, virtual organization with a really big reach, helping a lot of people. The Problem/Challenge To support its collaborative needs, NetHope employed an application called TAG (Take and Give) through which its members and internal team can work together on various program initiatives. Originally built on SharePoint 2007, TAG was intended to be both an internal tool for the team to manage a number of business processes including fundraising/development, finance/accounting, human resources and document management, as well as an extranet for supporting collaboration between NetHope’s member organizations. MetaVis Technologies Phone: (610) 717.0413 Email: info@metavistech.com www.metavistech.com
- 2. Helping you know your content MetaVis Technologies Phone: (610) 717.0413 Email: info@metavistech.com www.metavistech.com Unfortunately, NetHope’s needs outgrew the existing implementation. The organization had grown significantly, but TAG 1.0 (SharePoint 2007) was unable to keep up with the organizational changes, particularly in the area of security and user permissions. Along with growth of the internal team and membership base, a need arose to actively involve corporate supporters and partners (eg. Intel, Microsoft, Blackbaud, Accenture Development Partners, and others) in supporting program goals. This resulted in a new user segment that couldn’t be handled under TAG 1.0’s original security structure. As relationships with these partners/supporters grew, it was becoming increasingly challenging to engage them given the restrictive nature of the original platform’s design. In many ways, TAG (referred to as TAG 1.0) had become what many refer to as “a glorified file share”, rather than the collaborative platform it was intended to be. With three different primary roles clearly defined: internal team, members, corporate supporters/partners, NetHope needed a solution that would continue to support internal needs, enable members to collaborate in a secure environment and allow members to work with partner collaborators when necessary in support of the NetHope communities various program initiatives. The Migration Approximately one year ago, NetHope embarked on a project to revamp TAG 1.0 and find a solution that supported its current needs. As a result of an existing relationship with Microsoft (Microsoft is one of NetHope’s biggest -- and original -- corporate supporters), the decision was made to move to Office 365 and SharePoint Online. The migration to Office 365 was comprised of a number of steps: 1. Email migration to Exchange Online 2. Moving the internal team to the same version of productivity software 3. Development of TAG 2.0 in Office 365 SharePoint Online 4. The migration of data from the existing application to the new environment. Design of the new TAG 2.0 application was supported through RDA Corporation. With RDA assisting, NetHope used a team of three part-time internal team members to build out the new TAG site. RDA developed the master pages which outlined the overall design of TAG 2.0, while NetHope was responsible for the content areas within the site and creating/managing security and governance. Although initially a decision was made to quickly get content from TAG 1.0 over to TAG 2.0 by literally copying the original sites from TAG 1.0 with their content straight over, the process evolved to include developing a full enterprise and information architecture overhaul. As NetHope dug deeper into SharePoint and how it could be applied to their organization’s system requirements, the need for new governance, site structure, metadata and overall content management and quality control became apparent. The site collection was redesigned, causing the data from the original migration to have to be moved again, plus any new data added to TAG 1.0 since the completion of the original migration. Over a six month period, NetHope worked to migrate all the content over to TAG 2.0, ensuring that the sites were set up properly and data migrated correctly from the old system. They also ensured that security was correctly set up (user types and permissions) to guarantee the three primary user types would have access to content appropriate to their participation in the NetHope community.
- 3. Helping you know your content MetaVis Technologies Phone: (610) 717.0413 Email: info@metavistech.com www.metavistech.com Although the project started roughly in July of 2011, MetaVis did not join the implementation until mid-October 2011In the initial discussions with Microsoft and RDA regarding best practices for implementing SharePoint Online and migrating existing data, it became apparent that a manual migration was not the answer, and both companies made the same recommendation for copying content from SharePoint 2007 to Office 365 using MetaVis Migrator for Office 365. After the initial download and assignment of the license key, learning to use MetaVis Migrator proved to be relatively simple, requiring only an hour or two of instruction and exploration to learn the basics. When migrating data, whether copying or moving outright, the system advises the users when there’s a problem, allowing the user to pinpoint bad data or missing set up/requirements in the new site and make quick adjustments to resolve the issue. In a few cases, MetaVis support was contacted to help with the process, usually determining the issue was due to user error resolving it quickly and painlessly. Without MetaVis Migrator, moving the content would have been painfully slow. Content would have been downloaded from the server (TAG 1.0 was hosted on an external server by a member organization) to a desktop and then re-uploaded manually. It would have taken many additional months to migrate NetHope’s documents and none of the discussion, calendar information, contact information, lists of links, etc. would have been migrated without recreating them manually. Any manual recreation would have lost valuable meta-data, rendering the information all but useless. Given that NetHope actually migrated much of their content twice, migrating without MetaVis Migrator would have been a nightmare. Instead, NetHope was able quickly overwrite the original migration and focus their time and energy on quality control, accuracy and user experience while MetaVis did of the heavy lifting. The Decision To Go With MetaVis After a full, mid-implementation redesign, re-migrating content in a more appropriate piecemeal fashion, and learning both SharePoint Online and MetaVis Migrator from scratch, the full content migration was completed in July 2012. While the volume of data migrated, 25GB is small compared to that of a much larger organization, NetHope stresses there are a number of factors for its longer than expected timeline. NetHope’s internal operations team of three parttime people built TAG 2.0 from scratch with no prior SharePoint training or experience, while still managing their normal operational duties. The team did not include an IT professional, other than the hourly support offered by RDA. The data migration and site build-out involved input from 30+ internal team members, along with governance from a Strategy Team made up of nine internal team members and three IT professionals from NetHope’s member organizations. Original key system requirements numbered over 80, many of which were not supported by SharePoint Online or for which workarounds needed to be developed. Lastly, due to time and cost restraints, the final content migration was done by a single, part-time person, meticulously combing through each site in TAG 1.0 and moving its contents to the appropriate new locations in TAG 2.0. Considering these factors, NetHope was only able to implement the solution within its year timeframe because of implementing MetaVis Migrator. Without MetaVis, NetHope estimates it would have taken twice as long and with poorer results.
- 4. Helping you know your content MetaVis Technologies Phone: (610) 717.0413 Email: info@metavistech.com www.metavistech.com There is no doubt that moving to a new environment is challenging – moving to Office 365 and SharePoint Online proved that point emphatically. NetHope’s needs for SharePoint Online were unique given its organizational membership model – which translated into needs for both an intranet AND an extranet. However SharePoint Online was not really intended to support organizations whose users are not under a single enterprise. As such, TAG 2.0’s collaborative capabilities are currently still in a pilot stage, but much of the intranet experience thus far has been positive. The NetHope internal team is now on the same platform, using the same version of Microsoft’s productivity tools which allows for more consistency in how they work. Challenges As for challenges using MetaVis Migrator, the issues were minor. The most challenging pieces of the migration were user-created, such as having a given site structure fully built with all the appropriate settings turned on before migrating content, or remembering to check the appropriate boxes within the tool depending on the type of content being migrated and how it needs to be migrated (eg. Copying a single file versus copying an entire library or list). Regardless of the issues that arose, the MetaVis’s support team was able to answer all questions quickly. NetHope was extraordinarily thankful for the professionalism and responsiveness of the support team throughout their experience with MetaVis Migrator. Would NetHope recommend MetaVis to others? Some member organizations are currently looking to upgrade their own internal versions of SharePoint; NetHope says they have enthusiastically recommended MetaVis to members “even if they don’t ask.” “There’s no way we could get our entire organization up and running on Office 365 SharePoint without the help of MetaVis. They made it easy for us to migrate and organize our content in Office 365 so that users have the right access to information and can easily find the content they need.” Kara Tracey, Operational Development & Projects Manager, NetHope.