Case 02
Migrating SharePoint 2016 On-Prem to SharePoint Online
The Kurrent Logic team worked with DHS to move its on-premises SharePoint estate to the cloud — site by site, across several agencies, so the old on-premises infrastructure could finally be decommissioned.
The scale of it
The obstacle
Moving on-premises SharePoint sites to the cloud.
Five challenges shaped how the work had to be run — only one of them was really about SharePoint.
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01
Educating SharePoint site owners on the advantages of moving to SharePoint Online, and training them to administer their new, modernized sites.
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02
Balancing migration work against normal operations — site maintenance and enhancement requests kept coming from owners of live sites, and service levels had to stay high throughout.
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03
Forming a migration team and assigning migrations logically, in waves, until every site had moved and the old on-premises infrastructure could be decommissioned.
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04
Working across an extremely large user base — more than 30,000 people spread over multiple DHS agencies including DHS HQ, ICE, CBP, and USCIS, with some sharing reaching state and local law enforcement.
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05
Addressing custom-built solutions, especially those built by external contractor teams who were no longer embedded with their clients and could not support the rebuild.
Our path
Two problems, two methods.
The custom-built sites had to be reverse-engineered before they could be rebuilt. Everything else had to be industrialised so a small team could get through a large estate.
Key step 01 — Custom-built solutions
The most complex part of the project was identifying and understanding several custom-built applications commissioned by various government groups. In most cases those contracts had ended and the original contractors who built and maintained them could no longer be reached.
These SharePoint-hosted "applications" were generally a combination of custom pages (JavaScript, jQuery, CSS), custom forms (usually Microsoft InfoPath), and custom workflows (SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013). Every site in this category went through the same four stages.
Identify the stakeholders and owners of the site.
Meet with them to understand the requirements and how the system actually functions.
Brainstorm how that functionality could best be recreated in SharePoint Online.
Execute the migration or rebuild.
Key step 02 — An Agile approach
There was a large amount of work and only a small team to execute it, so we created a product backlog in which every site existed as a single item. Each migration then ran as its own small project: the assigned team member worked with the product owners, running daily stand-ups, testing, and requirements or feedback sessions as needed.
- Backlog
- One item per site, for the whole estate.
- Review
- Sites reviewed and estimated before being scheduled.
- Sprint
- A group of estimated sites packaged together, each assigned to one team member.
- Two weeks
- The window each sprint was executed over.
The result
The migration map.
SharePoint Online offered a far better toolset than SharePoint 2016, so rather than carry legacy technology across, the team converted anything facing an upcoming Microsoft end of life or end of support. Here is every path we took.
Microsoft InfoPath forms and both generations of SharePoint Designer workflow were the two technologies with an end-of-life ahead of them. Neither was carried across.
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