De uitdaging
Churches of Christ in Qld implemented Microsoft
SharePoint 2003 as its organisationwide intranet. The organisation also
found use for the platform as a document repository for control
documents, such as those containing, policies, procedures, forms,
applications, and templates.
SharePoint eventually
became an integral part of Churches of Christ in Qld’s daily activities,
and the organisation ultimately added a separate Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 environment to its deployment.
Churches
of Christ in Qld administrators maintained a highly centralised IT
environment, and SharePoint would automatically open on the desktops of
its 1,300 end-users as soon as their workstations were turned on each
day.
As the SharePoint environment continued to
grow, the organisation began to encounter challenges with the platform.
With approximately 3,000 sites in its environment and data growing each
day, both end-users and administrators had difficulty searching
SharePoint for specific information on the platform. The organisation
was also looking to make strides toward the next stage of its
deployment. “We decided that upgrading to the latest version of
SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, would help solve our search issues by
giving us more rigorous, built-in search capabilities, as well as
allowing us to start fresh and implement taxonomy policies across the
organisation,” said Greg Gaffney, IT Manager at Churches of Christ in
Qld. “Additionally, we were interested in moving toward using SharePoint
as our electronic document and records management system (EDRMS), and
felt the new features in SharePoint 2010 would be better suited for this
next step.”
Administrators investigated the
possibility of performing the migration to SharePoint 2010 in-house
manually using native upgrade tools. However, there were several major
concerns. First of all, SharePoint’s native migration abilities would
not allow an upgrade from SharePoint 2003 directly to SharePoint 2010,
requiring an upgrade to MOSS 2007 first. Additionally, native abilities
could not ensure a full-fidelity migration, and Churches of Christ in
Qld did not want to lose important information such as permissions and
security settings. Finally, time was an important factor for the
project. “I estimated that carrying out a manual migration in-house
would have taken more than six months to complete,” said Gaffney.
In
order to migrate its important data swiftly and securely, Churches of
Christ in Qld reached out to information and communications technology
solutions provider Dimension Data to carry out the job. “From our
previous work with Dimension Data, we knew they had good project
methodology and could bring someone with significant SharePoint
experience to the table,” Gaffney said.