Credit Union Content Migration

Thought Cloud was engaged to migrate documents and conversations between two M365 tenants, in preparation for the legal day one go-live for a merger between two large credit unions in the pacific northwest.

The business had several key objectives:

• meet their fast-approaching timeline
• minimize disruption, given that both businesses were operating 6 days per week
• ensure that migrated content would meet document retention and sensitivity requirements
• define SharePoint governance

One of the keys to a successful migration is adequate planning. There is always the temptation to take a "lift and shift" approach, but Thought Cloud believes migrations are an opportunity to take stock of existing content and reduce the need to migrate stale content, and also plan an information architecture that will make ensure that content is appropriately labelled and secured. This results in a better search and discovery experience, improving the prospect of end-user adoption.

As part of the Information Architecture planning process, Thought Cloud conducted a series of workshops, working with the businesses to define an agreed information taxonomy. This would lend itself to creating a central term store, and also allow us to create custom content types that could be used across their intranet. The IA also considered the requirements for site collections, security, and content planning. 

Once the fundamental architecture was in place, including setup of retention and sensitivity labels in Purview, a pre-flight check was performed to identify any possible migration risks, such as long files names, excessively large files, missing content owners, and more. Once the migration began, Thought Cloud monitored the process, reviewing migration logs, correcting issues, and reporting progress to stakeholders. At the completion of the migration process a delta migration was performed to account for any files or chats where new content was created since the migration process began.

All required content was migrated on-time to meet the legal day one go-live. Both organizations were able to access their documents in the consolidated tenant, while retaining appropriate access to their documents. During the migration process we were also able to identify orphaned content, and associate new owners.

Some of the benefits realized by the organizations included: 

• Reduced storage costs due to identifying stale or redundant content, and only migrating what was relevant
• Improved compliance outcomes via the introduction of sensitivity and retention labels
• A structured Governance model for SharePoint to assist in alignment between Business and IT objectives
• Strong early user adoption due to ease of search, document discovery, and site templates created for consistency