A smooth switch to Viva Engage for a fast-moving global cosmetics leader

Context

Amorepacific is the country’s pioneering cosmetics company, with teams and brands operating across the globe. In a fast paced, competitive, and ever-changing industry like beauty, staying connected is essential. Both their leadership and the market demand the highest standards when it comes to digital experience, transformation, and collaboration tools. For years, Workplace was where teams shared updates, celebrated wins, and stayed connected across time zones. It played a key role in communication, brand storytelling, and global engagement; from launching new products to sharing retail insights and building community across regions.

With Workplace closing and a much larger transition to Microsoft 365 on the horizon, Amorepacific made the decision to move their internal communities to Viva Engage, bringing conversations into the same ecosystem as their day-to-day M365 tools.

Challenge

Amorepacific had built up eight years of history on Workplace, with a substantial amount of content to be moved. Workplace was one of the internal communications channels for essential business information, from operational updates to campaign planning and collaboration. The two key challenges of the migration were tight timing and strict security requirements.  
 
Staff were actively using Workplace right up until Friday and needed to be ready to log in and get started with Viva Engage the following Monday. That left just one weekend to complete the delta migration, with no room for delays or missing content.  
 
At the same time, Amorepacific also had strict data security requirements, so the migration had to take place in their own Azure environment. 

Our approach

We started by working closely with the team at Amorepacific to understand how they were using Workplace day-to-day. Together, we worked through their current usage and identified the active groups that needed migrating. To handle the migration, we setup our migration tool in the customer’s Azure environment, ensuring that the customer’s strict data security requirements were maintained through the migration.
As this was our first migration for a Korean-based client, we ran extensive testing to make sure Korean language content came across clearly – including posts, comments and group information 

We also built a custom tool to work around limitations in the Workplace API, helping us recover and reinsert images that weren’t included in the standard exports.  

To meet the requirements around a very short two-day transition period, we worked out a strategy of migrating all content as soon as possible, and then doing several delta waves to migrate only the latest content. 

The scope of the migration included over 200 groups, many with thousands of members and tens of thousands of posts and comments.   

Result

The migration project was completed successfully, with content moved in time for staff to pick up from where they left off and continue their work without disruption. with content migrated in time for the client’s staff to continue their business-critical operations immediately after the migration and transition into M365.   

In total, we migrated over 200 groups with thousands of members and tens of thousands of posts.  

Through lightweight training and education of users, the client ensured that their staff were ready to use Viva Engage as part of M365, and by migrating content were able to ensure that necessary historical information was readily available inside their new M365 tenant.