Content Matrix Expertise Tops Native Tools for SharePoint Migration

OVERVIEW

Based in Victoria, B.C., itgroove Professional Services Ltd. is a consulting firm specializing in SharePoint and other Microsoft business solutions. The 10-year-old firm works with businesses throughout British Columbia, leveraging IT to help them achieve their operational and revenue goals.

• 3 Tier Farm. WEB/APP and full BI stack with PowerPivot
• Migration from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 50GB of content
• 10 full/concurrent users 12 hours a day with another 10-30 external users connecting for projects

THE CHALLENGE

As experts in SharePoint, itgroove had previously relied on using SharePoint’s native but limited database attach upgrades in moving its website from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 and finally to SharePoint 2010. But Sean Wallbridge, itgroove’s president and resident SharePoint guru, didn’t want to face the same problems of prior migrations when it was time to migrate to SharePoint 2013.

“As you migrate, you change your mind about your site,” he says. “But if you’re attaching the same content and site structure, you’re just bringing the old problems over to your new SharePoint environment. We decided that we wanted to green field everything.”

But the plan was complicated by the fact that itgroove’s website became increasingly complex as the business grew. Starting with two site collections, itgroove had reached 20 separate collections by the time it wanted to migrate to SharePoint 2013. Additionally, the collections had varying levels of features activated and would involve moving to SharePoint 2013’s claims-based authentication. It also was changing the site’s URL — a challenge in and of itself.

In sum, itgroove was looking for a solution that could help it:

• Move a diverse group of SharePoint site collections to a new domain with relative ease.
• Parse out legacy content that represented out-of-date approaches to its site needs, thus improve relevance and user experience
• Maintain an audit trail, with a time perspective, to safeguard against mistakes.
• Preserve security considerations without wrestling with different authentication systems as part of the upgrade.

THE SOLUTION

The best fit for itgroove? Metalogix Content Matrix. “I’ve been watching Metalogix over the years, and it has clearly established itself as the best of breed ISV in the SharePoint migration space,” Wallbridge says.

Wallbridge selected Metalogix Content Matrix to make the SharePoint 2013 upgrade because it provided:

• Ease of implementation
• Simplified information architecture creation
• Strategic naming and placement of library content
• Time and cost savings
• Continuous security

“Due to the age and complexity of the data we needed to perform a number of modifications and custom transformers to adapt the eRoom data prior to migration,” said Donahue. “Metalogix was exceptionally supportive throughout this process, adopting some of our input into the product and working with us every step of the way. It was a true collaborative experience that resulted in a very successful first migration phase.”

THE RESULTS

By relying on Metalogix Content Matrix instead of an out-of-the-box approach, Wallbridge and itgroove shifted to SharePoint 2013 for the new domain with ease. “We were able to re-envision our content and turn that vision into reality very fast,” he says. “Our approach had been that we would take as much time as the project required, but it ended up going much more quickly than we had anticipated.”

That meant itgroove could strip away unneeded legacy content while preserving security and enhancing overall usability. “Using just the standard tools, we would have been very limited in terms of what we could do,” Wallbridge says. “Now we have the latest technology and a clean slate. We couldn’t have done that without Metalogix.”

Beyond that, Metalogix allowed the migration to occur without any disruptions. “We had the luxury of fitting the work into our own busy schedules,” Wallbridge says. “It paid for itself within the first month.”