On the perfect wave: Ledvance migrates to the cloud

Ledvance is migrating its data to the hybrid world: thanks to the enhanced features of the novaCapta Migration Manager, this mammoth project went off without a hitch.

Lots of data, use of almost all SharePoint features and use od workflows 

Sites with long history (partly migrated from SharePoint 2007), lists and libraries with more data supported than Office365 

Complex site lifecycle process (application, creation, updating and archiving) 

Manual data migration means time-consuming effort and circumstances 

Hybrid solution (Office365 and On-Prem SharePoint Farm) 

Extension of the commercial migration tool Sharegate for data migration  

High automation and a clear process for the entire migration

Multiple control and management options, including the Global Site Directory (GSD) and novaCapta Migration Manager 

High time and cost savings through minimal manual effort 

Minimal downtime for all business areas through active planning of migration times  

Trouble-free migration without any fuss or problems

Consolidation of the IT landscape as a positive side effect 

The strategic decision of the management was clear: Ledvance is going into the cloud. Ledvance's management saw the benefits of data consolidation, lower infrastructure costs and broader use of the Office 365 package. Since some of the data could not be stored in the cloud, a hybrid solution was chosen. Apps and archive data had to be moved to an Azure SharePoint platform and all other data had to be stored in Office365-SharePoint. The IT team around Ralf Hennig was faced with a monumental task: the complete migration of three SharePoint farms with a lot of data, apps, workflows, lists and libraries. It quickly became clear that Ledvance would need external support for this project. novaCapta, which has been a reliable service provider for Ledvance for many years, convinced with its high solution competence in SharePoint, Office365, Azure and .Net. Another advantage was novaCapta‘s in-depth knowledge of the Global Site Directory (GSD) which was developed by novaCapta with its complex site lifecycle process.

The biggest painpoint in a migration project is the lack of transparency and the poor predictability of data movements. Even with the support of industry-standard tools, there is no insight into which data was migrated where, when and if errors occurred. This makes the entire migration a kind of black box: important information can be missing and a small error that is not immediately noticed and corrected can disrupt the entire time schedule. To ensure that Ledvance's migration was

quiet and noiseless, the novaCapta project team used the Global Site Directory as the central control instance, the commercial migration tool Sharegate, and two smaller tools developed in-house that provided greater transparency and predictability. 

"The very good analysis and evaluation tools for our SharePoint content have massively simplified the entire project implementation" confirms Ralf Hennig. The analysis and reporting functions allowed a good control of the data migration over the entire project duration. The first migration wave started in March 2018, the last one ended in November 2018. "The entire project ran absolutely on time and on budget and was implemented pragmatically, collegially and with a high level of solution competence for on-prem and the cloud," confirms Hennig. "We are very satisfied with the cooperation and look forward to future projects.

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