Aecom

SharePoint Middle East Migration Project

In the Middle East offices based in Dubai the company had a large SharePoint 2007 farm that had been in operation for some years serving the HR function in the region. Hosted on server operating systems and database systems that were soon to be deprecated by Microsoft, coupled with the very outdated SharePoint 2007 installation, it was clear that some action had to be taken to review the farm and plan to migrate and upgrade the system as a whole.

The problem was that after a large company acquisition and movement of resources within the company, all technical knowledge of the farm’s implementation had not been properly maintained, and hence there were large gaps in the understanding of the farm’s content and maintenance requirements. This was recognised by the company CIO, and therefore a plan of action was needed to reduce the exposure of risk to this application’s function.

The Solution

Working onsite in the Middle East offices, Dolphin IT Solutions experienced SharePoint technician spent 10 days doing a full technical review of the SharePoint 2007 farm. The review was conducted in such a way that no disruption of service or major changes were invoked on the farm so as not to cause disruption to staff members.

The review and assessment covered all aspects of the technical makeup of the farm including the server configurations, database health check, backup and disaster recovery procedures as well as the content on the farm and an assessment of content that could be targeted for archiving prior to any migration work being undertaken.

A series of meetings and interviews was also conducted with various management level staff members to try to establish any key points of failure and pain points that could be addressed as part of the migration and upgrade process.