Drug Free Sport New Zealand is a government affiliated organisation that works to keep NZ sport clean and free from doping, by educating, and supporting the athletic community.
Client
Drug Free Sport New Zealand
Industry
Sport, Government
Organisation Size
Small
Country
New Zealand
Technologies
Microsoft 365, SharePoint Online
Context
Doping is the use of performance enhancing drugs used by athletes to cheat in their respective sports – an unfair and unhealthy problem. Drug Free Sport New Zealand (DFSNZ) is an organisation working to eliminate doping to keep New Zealand sport and athletes clean. They do this work through education, advocation, investigation and testing in the sporting community.
As an organisation with an important role in sport-loving New Zealand, DFSNZ needed a cloud-based environment for their staff to access important documents and knowledge within. This was a sensible next step for their digital workplace as their previous environment was due to be decommissioned.
Engage Squared were delighted to be chosen by DFSNZ to undertake this migration project and migrate 200GB to SharePoint Online.
The challenge
DFSNZ recently acquired Microsoft 365 as their first step into the cloud, migrating their previous virtual desktop environment which was due to be decommissioned.
As part of this migration, DFSNZ needed to move several file shares, totalling around 200GB of information, nested in years of folders and old information architecture, into SharePoint Online. This was an important task as the upcoming decommission of the old environment was dependent on the migration of the file shares.
Along with this migration, a discovery was recommended to identify how DFSNZ operated and to better understand their document lifecycle. This was a unique chance to improve the ways of working due to platform migrations happening infrequently and with a platform such as Microsoft 365, future migrations may be decades away.
Engage Squared was chosen by DFSNZ to undertake the migration project, which consisted of four phases: discovery, preparation, migration, and review.
The solution
During the discovery phase, our project team scanned the on-premise file share locations to determine the complexity of the structure and identify any issues that would require remedying before migration. This discovery phase also provided an opportunity for DFRSNZ to improve their ways of working, with the identification of opportunities to automate processes and enhance security and external sharing capabilities.
Additionally, discussions were held between DFSNZ, CCL, and Engage Squared to determine where content from each source location would be located post-migration. The potential destination locations included: SharePoint Communication sites, Microsoft Teams, both public and private channels. These decisions were presented to the area experts to provide feedback on the final architecture.
The preparation phase involved our project team having the correct permissions in the source and destination locations to confirm all content will be migrated. Throughout this phase we also established the appropriate information architecture across SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams.
The migration phase was carried out by an Engage Squared engineer outside of business hours to not disrupt business as usual and to avoid potential issues such as document changes during the migration and errors arising from open documents. For those migration tasks needed to be performed during business hours, risks related to migrating files that are in use were considered, and an error report was created to highlight these areas for manual remediation.
Finally, a review of the migration tool logs was conducted to confirm the success of the migration and identify any issues that occurred during the process, along with steps to resolve them.
The impact
The successful migration of Drug Free Sport’s 200GB of file shares to SharePoint Online as part of the wider project to move to the cloud has had a significant impact on the organisation by modernising their digital workplace.
Drug Free Sport has established a secure cloud-based environment, enabling the organisation to access and share critical files and data more efficiently and effectively. As an organisation doing work around communities in NZ, the staff are benefitting from being able to access files from anywhere at any time.
With a platform as a service like Microsoft 365, the organisation is well-positioned to achieve long-term success and growth.