Cancer Focus NI – Migration to SharePoint and Office 365

Cancer Focus Northern Ireland (CFNI), invested in a new cloud-enabled service based on Microsoft Office 365 suite. This is a subscription-based solution which offers access to various services and software built around the Microsoft Office platform including SharePoint 2013.  CFNI planned to adopt SharePoint 2013 to manage and store documents, improving the collaboration capability across the organisation. Equiniti ICS partnered with Automated Intelligence for a cost-effective and efficient solution to cleanse and migrate content within CFNI File Share environment to SharePoint 2013 Office 365.

Challenge

The aim of CFNI is to work with the community to lower the risk of cancer and to fund ground-breaking research. Every year, CFNI supports over 4,000 people living with cancer, provides 3,100 counselling sessions and answers over 1,000 enquiries to their helpline. Effective and accurate sharing of information is essential in providing this type of service.  To deliver a better service to their clients, they needed to improve collaboration and efficiency across the organisation. They required an overall view of the data held within their existing environment and needed to consolidate this information to one collaborative platform, whilst identifying and removing duplicate and redundant items.

Solution

Equiniti ICS utilised Automated Intelligence’s products and services to meet the document migration requirements of their client. The first step of the project was to analyse and understand the current data within the organisation using AI.ANALYTICS. The tool analysed the content including file size and type.  The tool identified duplicates, redundant files and corporate records, and as a result, evaluated an impressive 81% storage saving. This enabled CFNI, Equiniti ICS and AI to better plan the migration and ensure timescales could be achieved.

After the final phase of analysis, the corporate documentation was identified and AI.DATAPOINT tool was then used to migrate documents from the source location. AI.DATAPOINT was chosen specifically for this project to enable automated migration, metadata transfer and appropriate source to destination mapping of relevant data, to the specified sites and document libraries in the final destination, SharePoint 2013 environment in Office 365.

Results

CFNI, Equiniti ICS and Automated Intelligence worked closely together to complete this migration within a short time frame and within budget. The automated migration capabilities of AI.DATAPOINT ensured that all relevant information was migrated effectively and accurately to the destination repository, Microsoft SharePoint Office 365.

Roisin Foster, Chief Executive of Cancer Focus, stated, “We exist to raise funds to help those suffering from cancer and those working towards finding a cure. Having the right technology is key to allowing our staff to spend as much time as they can focusing on fundraising and minimising time spent on grappling with ageing IT systems. We’re reaping the benefits of the work that has been done – our staff have much more flexibility with when and where they work, and we have peace of mind that all of our documents are properly protected and managed.

During the process, we had great support from Equiniti ICS and their partners, Automated Intelligence, whose detailed analysis of our storage system and files contained within helped us to estimate the amount of duplicate and redundant information that was held on our system, and in addition, advising us of our current and future data growth trends and the storage savings that might be realised if data growth was controlled”.