Silversands migrates critical solutions into SharePoint Online for London Fire Brigade

The Background

London Fire Brigade (LFB) has long used SharePoint to support many different but critical aspects of its operations, including its intranet and various departmental document management solutions. As part of its ‘Modern Workplace’ programme, LFB implemented Microsoft 365 several years ago, but the migration of services from the on-premises SharePoint 2013 platforms was deferred due to its scale and the potential difficulty caused by numerous integrations with other custom-developed applications.

However, with the impending end-of-life of SharePoint 2013, LFB had no choice but to initiate a project to migrate away from the legacy platform into SharePoint Online. As the intranet migration had already been completed, this project encompassed two key solutions; My Employment, an HR application that manages employee records, and Brigade-Wide Documents, which is a repository for operational process and procedure documentation.

With neither the time nor the experience to run all of it as an internal project, and through an existing support contract with LFB, we were asked to provide the necessary migration services and consultancy.

Normally, LFB would have had an internal project manager running this project but internal PM resources were not available and, therefore, we were also asked to provide the end-to-end project management (reporting to Phil Prior, LFB’s Programme Manager).

The Solution

At initiation, a project team was established, which included our principal consultant and other consultants, together with several technical resources from LFB, who provided the necessary assistance, technical input and liaison with other parts of the organisation.

The primary aim of the project was to move the two solutions, My Employment and Brigade-Wide Documents, from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online, but there were also secondary objectives to modernise the solutions and take advantage of the latest capabilities of SharePoint Online.

Initially, a technical workshop was convened so that the requirements, process and technical considerations could be identified, understood and managed appropriately.

Of the two solutions, My Employment was the more complicated, with around 12,500 sites, significant volumes of sensitive data, and many integrations with third-party custom solutions. Additionally, the plan was for the migrated solution to be integrated with a new HR payroll system that LFB was in the middle of implementing.

However, it quickly transpired that the payroll application was going to be delayed, meaning that this part of the project had to be reconsidered. While it would have been possible to redevelop the integration for the existing payroll system, this would ultimately have been wasted work and so a decision was made to build an integration ‘gateway’ agnostic of any specific payroll application. Once the new payroll system is live, it can simply be connected into My Employment through the gateway.

This decision to decouple My Employment from the payroll system and rearchitect the solution was seen as an important revision of the project approach, as it resolved a critical impact on the project timeline.

The next challenge for the project was managing the integrations for the 10+ secondary on-premises applications that feed data into My Employment. All these applications were hard-wired to work with SharePoint 2013 and the developers had no experience or knowledge of integrating the applications with SharePoint Online.

Rather than attempting to get the applications rewritten for SharePoint Online, which would have added significant time and risk to the project delivery, we proposed to build an ‘integration layer’ using Microsoft Power Platform and its on-premises gateway. This solution allows the secondary apps to interact with SharePoint Online without any modifications to their code.

Ultimately, these architectural decisions and custom integration solutions were able to resolve all the hurdles that the project team came up against and enabled the delivery to remain on track.

Alongside the development work to support the integration of the secondary applications, our consultants built an automation solution and worked on the data migration.

The automation uses Azure Automation to run regularly scheduled activities to manage joiners, leavers and movers, by granting or removing rights, configuring settings and so on.

In terms of the data migration, LFB wanted to make some changes in how the data was classified and structured in the new environment so we could not simply migrate each content piece like-for-like.

To manage the required re-mapping and classification changes, we created scripts and used source/target mapping rules to manage the process, which took several months to complete because of the very large volume of data – 1.8 million files were migrated in the end.

Alongside My Employment, the other part of the project was the migration of the Brigade-Wide Documents (BWD) repository from the same SharePoint 2013 platform.

This solution stores all LFB’s policies, procedures and guidance documents and is intrinsically linked with the Hotwire intranet, so the migration of the intranet and BWD had to be synchronised to ensure that all the relevant links remained valid.

With a much smaller volume of content, and the only integration being with Hotwire, the BWD migration was a much more straightforward endeavour than My Employment although it was converted from a classic to a modern site, to take advantage of SharePoint Online’s modern admin and content management capabilities.

The Results

The primary goal for LFB was to migrate away from the end-of-life SharePoint 2013 platform to SharePoint Online, but this was by no means a straightforward migration and one which LFB had some concerns about, including the potential impact to the users, the amount of data to migrate and the various external integrations linked to My Employment.

With LFB taking a flexible approach to the requirements and trusting our experience and knowledge, the project team was able to navigate all the potential issues that could have derailed or delayed the project.

By designing and building a ‘gateway’ integration for the future payroll system, we were able to decouple a key constraint that could otherwise have been a significant roadblock to the My Employment migration. And likewise, by working with the third-party developers to create similar integration gateways for the secondary applications, we were able to complete the migration and retain all the existing functionality with no changes required to the secondary applications.

Alongside the My Employment migration, the synchronised migration of Brigade-Wide Documents and the Hotwire intranet was also completed successfully. LFB is now running a modern SharePoint platform with all the operational, security and manageability improvements that brings.

By moving away from SharePoint 2013, a significant hardware investment (production, development & test) can be retired, the admin and support burden is reduced, and end-of-life supportability issues have been avoided.

Although the My Employment solution takes advantage of the modern capabilities of SharePoint Online, the user functionality is, by design, unchanged. However, the users have noted that its performance is significantly better, which is especially appreciated by the content admins. Furthermore, the users can access it directly from their browser, rather than having to log on to a Citrix desktop, as they did to access SharePoint 2013.

Crucially, the migrations of both My Employment and Brigade-Wide Documents were completed with no user disruption at all.

Of course, by moving to SharePoint Online, LFB also has the opportunity to add new features and build new applications that can take advantage of the much-improved functionality and integration with other parts of the Microsoft 365 suite.

At the end of this long project, LFB is delighted with the way that it has been approached and delivered by our project team.