Our client is a leading provider of early childhood education and care in Australia, offering a safe, inspiring environment where children can thrive. With over 100 modern centres across NSW, VIC, ACT, QLD, and SA, they supports more than 10,000 children daily.
Client
Withheld
Service
Viva Engage migration
Organisation size
Medium
Industry
Education
Context
When Meta announced it was closing its Workplace platform, organisations were suddenly faced with the question: What now? For our client, a leading childcare provider with more than 170 centres across Australia, they had a clear priority: they needed to preserve the rich history of collaboration, conversations, and knowledge they had built up over years on Workplace. With an investment in M365 already in place, it was Viva Engage to the rescue!
Engage Squared was delighted to support the migration from Workplace by Meta to Viva Engage, making it our biggest migration of data yet. With our tried-and-tested Workplace to Viva Engage migration tool, we helped them make the move to Viva Engage, preserving their history of employee connection and community knowledge, all whilst setting them up on a platform that aligned with their future.
Challenge
Platform migrations always come with their own challenges but for our client – a leading provider of early learning with over 100 centres across Australia, the stakes were uniquely high. Their Workplace platform contained more than just content; it was a living archive of collaboration, conversations and community spanning over 283 groups, with tens of thousands of posts, comments and images. This wasn’t just data to be lifted and shifted, it was an organisational story that needed to be protected, intact. Every contribution had to be properly attributed. Every interaction had to remain accessible. And the transition had to happen quickly, before access to Workplace was shut off for good.
But as with any enterprise platform migration, complexity quickly surfaced. Our client needed to migrate a large volume of content while resolving structural differences between Workplace and Viva Engage – from naming conventions and formatting quirks to emoji handling and metadata alignment. Adding to the challenge, some Viva Engage users hadn’t yet been assigned licences, creating a risk that contributions would be attributed to generic “historical users,” rather than the original people behind them.
With a tight timeframe and the cultural stakes high, this wasn’t just a technical task, it was a race to preserve the heart of our client’s digital community, without compromise.
Our solution
Engage Squared worked closely with out client to design and deliver a structured, reliable, and people-focused migration from Workplace to Viva Engage. Our largest data migration to date!
Unlike previous projects, which typically involved 3, 6 or 12 months of content, they required a full 24 months of data to be migrated. This added complexity and volume, with some individual groups containing close to 10,000 posts. To manage this at scale, we focused on what mattered most: protecting their collaboration history, avoiding disruption, and ensuring a smooth transition for every user.
We began with a discovery phase to understand the current and future state for their Enterprise Social Network (ESN) and collaborated with them to build a master migration list (MML). Together, we defined which groups should be migrated, which could be archived, and in what order, organising the rollout into waves to ensure a clear, phased process that aligned with their business priorities.
Along the way, our team of technical consultants tackled key technical challenges early. We resolved issues with group naming (including handling emojis and duplicates), validated all active users to avoid “historical” misattribution of posts, and ran trial migrations to surface potential issues before they impacted the broader rollout. These seemingly small details made a big difference to the overall experience.
Throughout the project, we used our proven Workplace to Viva Engage migration tool to manage the content transfer. While the tool has supported many migrations before, this was its biggest test, successfully migrating 283 groups and tens of thousands of posts, comments and images, all without a hitch.
The migration was efficient, well-organised, and fully aligned to our client’s goals. More importantly, it preserved their collaboration history in full, enabling their people to continue working, sharing, and connecting in Viva Engage without missing a beat.
Result
Engage Squared are proud to have seamlessly transitioned our client’s digital communities from Workplace to Viva Engage, preserving every post, comment, and image without disrupting business operations or internal culture. Over 283 community groups and tens of thousands of contributions were migrated, each one properly attributed to maintain the integrity of their organisational story.
Thanks to a structured, collaborative approach, employees were able to access their familiar communities from day one with no confusion and more importantly – no downtime. Teams picked up right where they left off, continuing to connect, share, and collaborate without skipping a beat.
The shift to Viva Engage has also unlocked long-term value. With its seamless integration into Microsoft Teams, employees now have a modern, unified space for communication and knowledge sharing, bringing collaboration into the flow of everyday work. Adoption across the organisation was rapid, aided by Viva Engage’s intuitive experience and alignment with the tools that staff already used.
This project was more than just a platform migration, it protected the cultural fabric of our client’s dispersed organisation. With our support, they preserved their history and empowered their teams with a future-ready platform that supports ongoing connection, collaboration, and growth.
