The Challenge

MSU Billings is part of Montana State University, which has four campuses across the state. MSU Billings also has several sites within the city of Billings, including a main campus, downtown campus, and a College of Technology campus. Additionally, like any university, its students, faculty, and staff reside and work both on and off campus. In order to enable students and workers to share information and collaborate on documents more effectively, MSU Billings utilizes Microsoft SharePoint.

The platform is available for anyone at the university to utilize. The Human Resources department, for instance, uses SharePoint for its hiring process. As resumes are submitted, they are scanned and uploaded to SharePoint so relevant parties can access the documents no matter where they are located. “With four campuses in multiple locations across the state, accessing content through SharePoint is much easier,” said Kendra Hughes, Computer System Analyst at MSU Billings. “It’s simpler than having to search through email and helps make certain you’re accessing the most up-to-date version of a document.”

In order to take advantage of new features and utilize the most current version of the platform, MSU Billings decided to upgrade its SharePoint environment from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to Microsoft SharePoint 2010. However, after a quick investigation into the process of migrating all 15 gigabytes (GB) of the organization’s SharePoint data from one version to another, Hughes realized it could be an extremely time-consuming effort using only SharePoint’s native functionality. “The migration process would have taken years to complete, as the only way I could figure out how to do it was to move one file over at a time.” Hughes said. “I knew that a manual migration using SharePoint’s native tools just wasn’t possible for us.” With that in mind, Hughes began to search for a solution to her migration challenge.