Department for Business and Trade, UK Government

SharePoint migration

The Department of Business and Trade (DBT) is the UK Governments department for economic growth combining trade policy, investment promotion and business regulation. Their key aims are to create growth, jobs and higher living standards across the UK, whilst championing free trade and economic security.

Formed in 2023 as part of the decision to split the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) into three specialised and focused departments covering business, trade, climate policy, science and innovation. The Department of Business and Trade gave us the mammoth task of migrating all the information belonging to their new department from the former BEIS SharePoint Online tenant. This was a large-scale data migration of over 700 SharePoint sites and over 27 Terabytes of data, for scale that’s the equivalent of over 23.5 million copies of War and Peace!

THE SERVICES WE PROVIDED

Digital Strategy

Digital Services Delivery

CHALLENGES

all data required thorough analysis and reorganisation prior to migration due to the organisational restructure
ensuring no corruption or loss when moving epic amounts of data
preserving version history and metadata without vastly increasing storage needs and complexity
ensure that DBT staff have read access to files during migration windows
ability to rollback without any end-user disruption
avoid data throttling from both BEIS and DBT tenants

TECHNOLOGY

Sharepoint

THE SOLUTION

we supported DBT’s Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) team with planning, analysis and data mapping
we developed communication and mapping templates, delivered presentations, responded to user queries and guided data mapping decisions
we delivered three end-user workshops every week to help users with the transition
scheduled and executed migrations using custom automation, tailored to DBT’s requirements
parallel migrations using several high-powered ShareGate migration servers
pre- and post-migration reports to compare item counts, sizes and permissions

OUTCOMES AND BENEFITS

content that is now owned by DBT was successfully migrated to their SharePoint Online tenant without loss or corruption
correct users have access to the data they need on one secure platform
version control and metadata maintained
no downtime experienced
migration completed ahead of schedule

We delivered one of the fastest and most cost-efficient migration programmes of this scale ever executed within government!

Charlotte Saxby, Engagement Manager, Department for Business and Trade (source DBT's Machinery of Government: an insight into the teams behind the Single IT Platform migration project, part 1)

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