Intranet develop to improve user experiences

Transport Focus are an independent transport user watchdog. Their mission is to get the best deal for passengers and road users and to know what is happening on the ground.

Transport Focus ran their email and intranet in an on-premise Exchange and SharePoint 2010 environment.

Maintenance and operating costs of running their 2010 email infrastructure had increased dramatically and due to the complexity of
their intranet users were left frustrated and unwilling to use the system.

Transport Focus wanted to embrace the Cloud and provide a central platform to improve employee engagement, collaboration and flexibility by migrating to Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

• To create a functional, simple, easy to use, intuitive intranet that could be used by all users.
• Ensure the new intranet can hold documents from the SharePoint 2010 environment.
• Prepare their existing configured Office 365 tenant for email migration.
• Migrate over 100 mailboxes from Exchange to Office 365.

Following a series of discovery days with end users to ascertain their requirements Polymorph were able to make appropriate recommendations for email migration, SharePoint migration and a bespoke SharePoint Online intranet.

• Developed with 6 team sites and dedicated site for holding projects.
• All sites where created with the Transport Focus branding and were responsive across all mobile devices.
• Final solution enabled news to be delivered to all users across multiple sites using tagging functionality.
• Provided a secure area for each department to create multiple public and private document libraries

Following the delivery of the final solution a SharePoint migration was performed using Polymorph’s preferred migration tool ‘Sharegate’. The migration transferred multiple document libraries from the SharePoint 2010 environment to the new intranet, separating each document library by department. The migration also transferred all existing projects to the new environment tagging them with the relevant metadata.

Over 430GB of email data and 100 mailboxes were migrated from Exchange to Office 365 using Microsoft’s in-built “cut over” migrating method.

Training sessions were held for end users and power users across the client’s London and Manchester sites. These sessions provided users with the knowledge to create news, manage documents, create new projects and run the intranet day-to-day.

• Microsoft Office 365 has simplified remote access; automatic updates are now seamless and easy to manage; security features are more efficient and the cost of maintenance has reduced significantly.
• SharePoint Online now provides a better platform for communication and collaboration throughout the organisation.
• A new corporate directory has made it easy to search for employee contact details. Previously this feature had become unusable. The corporate directory is synchronised from Active Directory ensuring the results are always up to date and relevant.
• It is now easier for Transport Focus to have clear visibility of projects and archive any projects that are completed.
• SharePoint Online provides a more extensive and powerful search latform making it easier for end users to find and identify documents.