case study- migration/nethope

Helping you know your content

Business OverviewNetHope is a small, not-for-profit organization thatsupports the needs of humanitarian organizationswhich help developing countries though the smarteruse of technologies and technology enabled solutions.It has a large reach in terms of membership -- 35 ofthe largest international non-governmentalorganizations (NGOs) are members of the NetHopeorganization.

CASE STUDY: NetHope

Problem/Challenge:Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to Office 365 SharePoint

Products:MetaVis Migration Suite

Success Factors:• Moved documents, lists, calendar entries & discussions• Maintained metadata• Shortened migration time• More control and accuracy over content

A lesson in Migrating and Organizing Content in Office 365

NetHope offers a range of services, such as:

• Connectivity: NetHope was initially founded to bring connectivity to remote, geographically challenged areas insupport of member organizations’ field operations.

• Field Capacity Building: NetHope offers training and skills development to member NGOs and field staff to help thembe more productive. Additionally, after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the NetHope Academy was launched to helptrain local interns on Microsoft and other technologies, whom members and other organizations then hire tosupport their field operations. The program was expanded this year to Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa.

• Emergency Response: Supports a faster, coordinated response to disasters. For example, NetHope worked with apartner organization after the Haiti earthquake to build a network to allow members to get back up and running todo emergency operations and recovery activities.

• Shared Services: NetHope helps members get up and running with a variety of shared back-office services. As anexample, it helped members build a Shared Services Helpdesk that is now self-sustaining.

• Innovation for Development: NetHope looks at what the needs are out there for planning solutions for healthcare,agriculture, education and figures out how technology can be used to come up with better ideas/ways of doingthings.

It’s a small, virtual organization with a really big reach, helping a lot of people.

The Problem/ChallengeTo support its collaborative needs, NetHope employed an application called TAG (Take and Give) through which itsmembers and internal team can work together on various program initiatives. Originally built on SharePoint 2007, TAGwas intended to be both an internal tool for the team to manage a number of business processes includingfundraising/development, finance/accounting, human resources and document management, as well as an extranetfor supporting collaboration between NetHope’s member organizations.

MetaVis Technologies Phone: (610) 717.0413 Email: [email protected] www.metavistech.com



Unfortunately, NetHope’s needs outgrew the existing implementation. The organization had grown significantly, butTAG 1.0 (SharePoint 2007) was unable to keep up with the organizational changes, particularly in the area of securityand user permissions. Along with growth of the internal team and membership base, a need arose to actively involvecorporate supporters and partners (eg. Intel, Microsoft, Blackbaud, Accenture Development Partners, andothers) in supporting program goals. This resulted in a new user segment that couldn’t be handled under TAG 1.0’soriginal security structure. As relationships with these partners/supporters grew, it was becoming increasinglychallenging to engage them given the restrictive nature of the original platform’s design. In many ways, TAG (referredto as TAG 1.0) had become what many refer to as “a glorified file share”, rather than the collaborativeplatform it was intended to be.

With three different primary roles clearly defined: internal team, members, corporate supporters/partners, NetHopeneeded a solution that would continue to support internal needs, enable members to collaborate in a secureenvironment and allow members to work with partner collaborators when necessary in support of the NetHopecommunities various program initiatives.

The MigrationApproximately one year ago, NetHope embarked on a project to revamp TAG 1.0 and find a solution that supportedits current needs. As a result of an existing relationship with Microsoft (Microsoft is one of NetHope’s biggest -- andoriginal -- corporate supporters), the decision was made to move to Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

The migration to Office 365 was comprised of a number of steps:

1. Email migration to Exchange Online2. Moving the internal team to the same version of productivity software3. Development of TAG 2.0 in Office 365 SharePoint Online4. The migration of data from the existing application to the new environment.

Design of the new TAG 2.0 application was supported through RDA Corporation. With RDA assisting, NetHope useda team of three part-time internal team members to build out the new TAG site. RDA developed the master pageswhich outlined the overall design of TAG 2.0, while NetHope was responsible for the content areas within the siteand creating/managing security and governance.

Although initially a decision was made to quickly get content from TAG 1.0 over to TAG 2.0 by literally copying theoriginal sites from TAG 1.0 with their content straight over, the process evolved to include developing a fullenterprise and information architecture overhaul. As NetHope dug deeper into SharePoint and how it could beapplied to their organization’s system requirements, the need for new governance, site structure, metadata andoverall content management and quality control became apparent. The site collection was redesigned, causing thedata from the original migration to have to be moved again, plus any new data added to TAG 1.0 since thecompletion of the original migration.

Over a six month period, NetHope worked to migrate all the content over to TAG 2.0, ensuring that the sites wereset up properly and data migrated correctly from the old system. They also ensured that security was correctly setup (user types and permissions) to guarantee the three primary user types would have access to contentappropriate to their participation in the NetHope community.



Although the project started roughly in July of 2011, MetaVis did not join the implementation until mid-October2011In the initial discussions with Microsoft and RDA regarding best practices for implementing SharePoint Onlineand migrating existing data, it became apparent that a manual migration was not the answer, and both companiesmade the same recommendation for copying content from SharePoint 2007 to Office 365 using MetaVis Migratorfor Office 365.

After the initial download and assignment of the license key, learning to use MetaVis Migrator proved to berelatively simple, requiring only an hour or two of instruction and exploration to learn the basics. When migratingdata, whether copying or moving outright, the system advises the users when there’s a problem, allowing the userto pinpoint bad data or missing set up/requirements in the new site and make quick adjustments to resolve theissue. In a few cases, MetaVis support was contacted to help with the process, usually determining the issue wasdue to user error resolving it quickly and painlessly.

Without MetaVis Migrator, moving the content would have been painfully slow. Content would have beendownloaded from the server (TAG 1.0 was hosted on an external server by a member organization) to a desktopand then re-uploaded manually. It would have taken many additional months to migrate NetHope’s documents andnone of the discussion, calendar information, contact information, lists of links, etc. would have been migratedwithout recreating them manually. Any manual recreation would have lost valuable meta-data, rendering theinformation all but useless.

Given that NetHope actually migrated much of their content twice, migrating without MetaVis Migrator would havebeen a nightmare. Instead, NetHope was able quickly overwrite the original migration and focus their time andenergy on quality control, accuracy and user experience while MetaVis did of the heavy lifting.

The Decision To Go With MetaVis

After a full, mid-implementation redesign, re-migrating content in a more appropriate piecemeal fashion, andlearning both SharePoint Online and MetaVis Migrator from scratch, the full content migration was completed inJuly 2012. While the volume of data migrated, 25GB is small compared to that of a much larger organization,NetHope stresses there are a number of factors for its longer than expected timeline. NetHope’s internal operationsteam of three parttime people built TAG 2.0 from scratch with no prior SharePoint training or experience, while stillmanaging their normal operational duties. The team did not include an IT professional, other than the hourlysupport offered by RDA. The data migration and site build-out involved input from 30+ internal team members,along with governance from a Strategy Team made up of nine internal team members and three IT professionalsfrom NetHope’s member organizations.

Original key system requirements numbered over 80, many of which were not supported by SharePoint Online or forwhich workarounds needed to be developed. Lastly, due to time and cost restraints, the final content migration wasdone by a single, part-time person, meticulously combing through each site in TAG 1.0 and moving its contents tothe appropriate new locations in TAG 2.0. Considering these factors, NetHope was only able to implement thesolution within its year timeframe because of implementing MetaVis Migrator. Without MetaVis, NetHope estimatesit would have taken twice as long and with poorer results.



There is no doubt that moving to a new environment is challenging – moving to Office 365 and SharePoint Onlineproved that point emphatically. NetHope’s needs for SharePoint Online were unique given its organizationalmembership model – which translated into needs for both an intranet AND an extranet. However SharePoint Onlinewas not really intended to support organizations whose users are not under a single enterprise.

As such, TAG 2.0’s collaborative capabilities are currently still in a pilot stage, but much of the intranet experiencethus far has been positive. The NetHope internal team is now on the same platform, using the same version ofMicrosoft’s productivity tools which allows for more consistency in how they work.

Challenges

As for challenges using MetaVis Migrator, the issues were minor. The most challenging pieces of the migration wereuser-created, such as having a given site structure fully built with all the appropriate settings turned on beforemigrating content, or remembering to check the appropriate boxes within the tool depending on the type ofcontent being migrated and how it needs to be migrated (eg. Copying a single file versus copying an entire library orlist). Regardless of the issues that arose, the MetaVis’s support team was able to answer all questions quickly.NetHope was extraordinarily thankful for the professionalism and responsiveness of the support team throughouttheir experience with MetaVis Migrator.

Would NetHope recommend MetaVis to others? Some member organizations are currently looking to upgrade theirown internal versions of SharePoint; NetHope says they have enthusiastically recommended MetaVis to members“even if they don’t ask.”

“There’s no way we could get our entire organization up and running on Office365 SharePoint without the help of MetaVis. They made it easy for us to migrateand organize our content in Office 365 so that users have the right access toinformation and can easily find the content they need.”

Kara Tracey, Operational Development & Projects Manager, NetHope.

case study- migration/nethope

Documents