Overview
iSoftStone partnered with a Fortune 500 Finance organization to migrate a large on-premise SharePoint-based platform. Their implementation of SharePoint was used to host and distribute all in-house communication to Finance employees as well as manage and operate all financial processes. Working directly with this company’s IT organization, iSoftStone delivered a cloud-based SharePoint solution that enhanced communication across teams, optimized business processes, and reduced overall IT costs.
The problem
The Finance organization had a on-premise SharePoint platform with a content database of 1.5TB with multiple site collections and hundreds of sites. Hosting hardware was nearing end of life and content needed to be migrated to SharePoint Online.
Additionally, content across finance teams was not easily discoverable and there was no consistent means for tagging and managing content and no data detention policy was in place.
Because of the volume of site collections, subsites, and pages, there was a lack of standards and consistency across page layouts, navigation, and information architecture. This led to confusion across teams on finding and delivering content.
The solution
iSoftStone cataloged the existing on-premise environment and developed an information and security architecture that allowed a decentralized content management model by identifying business stakeholders to manage and administer separate SharePoint Online site collections organized by business function and process. Standard navigation was developed to provide a seamless experience for users as they navigated across site collections within the Finance online platform.
A governance model was established to help content owners manage their content for their teams as well as apply standards around tagging, workflow notifications, and data retention to simplify managing files across the entire finance organization.
iSoftStone’s agility and engagement with the business to refactor the information architecture was critical to the process and which resulted in a reduction of the amount of content needing to be migrated, an updated Finance branded design package, and the first production implementation of Microsoft IT’s Configuration Manager.
Key impacts
The Finance organization was able to realize hard dollar savings in both server hosting and content management costs by moving to SharePoint Online and delegating site management activities to business and process owners.
Content management was standardized ensuring communication across Finance teams was discoverable and usable. With document management and data retention governance policies established, content remained relevant and useful.
Overall user experience was simplified with both Modern design and the use of improved tagging allowing users to quickly find information they need with simple search and navigation.
Core technologies/deliverables
- SharePoint Online
- MetaVis migration suite
- Agile
- UX and design
- Quality Assurance testing
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Thorough documentation and training materials
- Azure DevOps (for project management)
