Company Data Migration on SharePoint Server
Consolidating Data Between SharePoint Environments
Introduction
The Ardonagh Group, a leading UK insurance broker and underwriter organisation, acquired Corant Global and its subsidiaries, including Besso, in 2021. As part of their efforts to unify their newly acquired companies, Ardonagh needed to consolidate their inherited SharePoint systems into a single environment. This complex migration required extensive scripting and relied on a deep understanding of the businesses and their platforms. Dolphin IT Solutions was engaged to lead the entire migration effort across the various SharePoint 2013 environments.
Challenges
Following the acquisition of multiple entities under Corant, The Ardonagh Group required a full consolidation of all their inherited SharePoint sites into a single, unified domain. This was a large-scale manual migration effort due to the platform's legacy status and bespoke configuration.
Key objectives included:
- Domain Consolidation: Migrate all SharePoint content from legacy domains such as Besso to a unified domain.
- Comprehensive Scope: Include every site collection, subsite, list, document library, and associated Nintex workflows in the migration plan.
- Permissions Analysis: Audit and replicate granular list and item level permissions across the entire environment.
- Workflow Mapping: Identify and catalogue all Nintex workflows, including their triggers, associated lists, and dependencies.
- Backup & Recovery Planning: Perform full site, site collection, and web application backups, to mitigate any risk during the transition.
- Workflow Management: Disable all workflow triggers pre-migration to ensure a clean transfer and prevent premature workflow executions in the target domain.
Our Solution
Dolphin IT Solutions delivered the migration using PowerShell, due to the limitations of an unsupported and highly bespoke, legacy platform.
Key actions included:
- PowerShell-Driven Migration: We developed and executed a suite of PowerShell scripts to copy content from the source to the target environments, preserving all systems' structure & data integrity.
- Site-by-Site Review: We manually reviewed and migrated each site, list, and library to adhere to the alignment of the new environment's structure.
- Permissions Rebuild: We extracted and documented all of the existing permission configurations, including unique list and item level settings, then recreated them programmatically in the new SharePoint environment.
- Workflow Discovery and Deactivation: We identified hundreds of Nintex workflows across the various SharePoint farms, and identified their dependencies, before disabling all triggers to enable a safe and seamless migration.
- Resilient Backup Strategy: We took full backups of each site and site collection, to allow rollback or comparison if required during verification.
- Post-Migration Validation: We conducted thorough post-migration checks to confirm access and functionality in the new environment.
The migration project ensured a successful unification of legacy domains under Ardonagh's branding, which enabled a consistent user experience and eased the burden of maintaining fragmented systems.
