Overview
iSoftStone partnered with a major public university to help migrate and future-proof a SharePoint-based system used to manage housing and dining across a 700+ acre campus in a major metropolitan area. By embedding our professional consultants with the university's administrative team, iSoftStone got to know the business while migrating and streamlining processes on a more modern platform.
The problem
- The on-campus housing and dining department of a major public university operated an intranet using SharePoint 2010.
- The SharePoint sites handled document management and workflows for many of the university's business processes, including:
- Hiring of student employees to staff dining halls
- Shifting reporting from residential advisors into the residence halls
- Trademark management
- Front desk services (such as package delivery)
- Key replacement, and
- Lost and found
- The system was experiencing a number of errors, including problems with workflows and timed jobs. Additionally, SharePoint 2010 was approaching its end of life.
- The system also did not properly reflect the university’s brand.
The solution
After a robust discovery process, iSoftStone architected and designed a SharePoint 2016 server farm and then performed a full migration at the content level (rather than simply upgrading the existing databases) in order to give the department a fresh start with new SQL databases.
iSoftStone led each unit within the department in performing user acceptance testing.
The migrations had to be completed with minimal downtime since parts of the system, particularly the residence hall reporting and incident management processes, have to be functional around the clock.
iSoftStone worked closely with the department’s communications team to rebuild the system homepage, replacing undocumented customizations with out-of-the-box functionality that achieves the same results. In close coordination with communications, iSoftStone then updated the branding of the whole system to match the university’s brand guidelines.
Key impacts
Interactively worked with key members from the University through an iterative and extremely thorough discovery process to identify needs and requirements, detect undocumented components from previous installations, and to bring the site into compliance with branding guidelines.
Implemented a new SharePoint farm and migrated data from the old installations to new installations, thus removing transient data errors.
Developed User Acceptance Testing (UAT) scripts and led teams on acceptance testing.
Developed training documentation and presentation materials and delivered training to department personnel.
Efficiently implemented a new SharePoint 2016 server farm, removing data errors, with minimal downtime.
Re-architected the information architecture to provide for better data management.
Timer job problems and other persistent system issues were eliminated due to the improved architecture and rebuilt databases.
The housing and dining department is now better-positioned for future upgrades or to move to SharePoint Online should it choose to do so in the future.
Core technologies/deliverables
- SharePoint 2016
- On-premises server farm
- Azure Active Directory
- ShareGate tools and workflows
- Agile
- UX, design, and theming
- Quality Assurance testing
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Thorough documentation and training materials
- SharePoint (for project mananagement)
- Azure DevOps (for project management)
