Conga's migration to Microsoft 365 resulted in an effective Knowledge Management ecosystem within the budget

Products/Solutions

The solution leverages the major components of the Microsoft 365 suite:

• Microsoft 365
• MS Teams
• SharePoint Online
• OneDrive
• Power BI

In addition, the solution also leverages Cloud FastPath for high-speed data transfer during migration.

Slack to Teams Migration Assessment

Solution Summary

Netwoven assisted Conga with the assessment, planning, and implementation of a comprehensive content & collaboration solution in Microsoft 365 by consolidating their existing tools and practices that included the use of Slack, HipChat, and Dropbox. The combination of Slack and HipChat enabled social interactions and collaboration while Dropbox was being used as an enterprise file sharing solution. Building a replacement solution combining these varied tools required extensive knowledge across the entire Microsoft 365 suite as well as specialized knowledge to plan and execute a successful migration. Netwoven partnered with the Conga team to design an intuitive information architecture to replace their existing solutions, evolve a comprehensive migration approach, and execute a high-speed data migration to successfully help Conga make the transition.

Netwoven and Conga collaborated to define the projected solution by evaluating the workloads offered by Microsoft, building extensive prototypes to tease out nuances, and finally agreeing on the specifics related to the Microsoft 365 solution and the migration strategy to get there.

Conga and Netwoven also partnered to create awareness, engage stakeholders, train affected employees, build intuitive experiences to facilitate the process and bridge gaps, execute a high-quality migration, facilitate UAT, address issues, and ultimately smoothly transition from a set of diverse tools to a unified Microsoft 365 environment.

Challenges

Conga decided on the existing tools as high-value targets for retirement, consolidation, and enhancement into Microsoft 365 for several reasons including:

• Significant overlapping yearly licensing costs
• Varied user experiences created an environment lacking unified knowledge management and collaboration experience for the organization
• Disparate storage tools were inefficient from several perspectives e.g. deduplication, content search, security, records management, classification, authoring and publishing, data governance and archiving
• Consolidation and additional insights through technological innovation using the Microsoft stack
• As part of a larger go-forward plan, consolidation of resources and focus on building maturity on one key platform.

After Conga decided to consolidate, it challenged its IT team to bring this to fruition. The previous systems came with several burdens including specialized knowledge needed for the maintenance of many different solutions, confusion about which tool to use and when, cluttered environments with duplicate data, and more. These factors forced the prioritization of the consolidation from existing systems to Microsoft 365.

Unfortunately, the given systems were disparate, and each had its nuances for migration. Special knowledge is required to ensure that all data is migrated into the most appropriate workloads in Microsoft 365. The migration path for Conga was not without challenges, including the following:

• Migrating a variety of ingrained solutions used by a company with 1,500+ users
• Lack of commercially available tools for adequately migrating Slack and HipChat to MS Teams
• Lack of availability or limitations in migration APIs that required innovation and creativity to work around to still achieve a quality migration product
• Facilitating stakeholder and user participation and feedback at scale with efficiency
• Supporting a large variety of migration scenarios and identifying the best path for each case
• Evaluating and migrating many terabytes of content and millions of messages
• Addressing application integrations and extensions as a part of the transition to MS Teams
• Maintaining business continuity with minimal impact
• Supporting the business to remain effective while transitioning to a new set of tools

Thus, Conga required a partner and a solution with expertise in Microsoft 365 and migrations that would guarantee the build of high quality, modern solutions in M365 as well as the ability to map anything and everything within HipChat, Slack and Dropbox to M365. Netwoven was chosen as the global delivery partner of choice to ensure that all challenges were met and that the solution was delivered with cost-efficiency.

Solution Strategy

The major driver behind the solution strategy was to design an intelligent and effective Knowledge Management ecosystem with all content migrated and stored under different Microsoft 365 workloads. The ecosystem would develop the foundation of a framework that would make use of content stored under different repositories, extract key information to create topics (subjects of interests) and associate those topics with other entities like people, roles, org structure, business units, projects, products or any items in organization taxonomies. Conga employees needed to be able to enjoy the benefit of such a Knowledge Ecosystem in most of the actions they perform while collaborating with others in the organization and beyond. Whether sending a message through Teams, writing an email, or searching for a piece of information, they should be able to leverage the knowledgebase effectively so that productivity increases and information accuracy improves.

Netwoven and Conga IT worked together with key business stakeholders to complete the migration through phases of assessment, planning, and execution. It considered each input workload and created a detailed mapping.

HipChat to Teams Migration

HipChat’s SaaS solution was going offline on 2/15/2019. Instead of moving HipChat to Slack, Conga decided to replace this technology with Microsoft Teams (“Teams”). The amount of time available to execute this change was minimal and to avoid the expensive option of a Slack licensing, Conga requested Netwoven’s assistance to quickly move from HipChat to Microsoft Teams without losing any of the existing data in HipChat.

This was done in the following phases:

Microsoft Teams Cutover & Adoption

The cutover phase was completed by exporting all of Conga HipChat content, in full fidelity, in the very aggressive window supplied to do so. Microsoft Teams were provisioned to replace each HipChat Room so that all users could be cutover to using Microsoft Teams. This was essential to ensure business continuity beyond the HipChat shutdown.

Deliverables:

1. Advisory support for Teams add-ons for Jira, Jenkins, and Confluence
2. Create Microsoft Teams for all HipChat Rooms
3. Apply Users / Permissions to Teams
4. Validate Extracted HipChat Content & Download Files
5. Communications / Change Management Advisory Support

Migration Readying

Before beginning an actual migration, there were several activities that were to be completed. This included tool installation & configuration, final presentation, and deliberation on the migration approach & timeline, and more.

Deliverables:

1. Finalize the migration approach
2. Finalize tool preparation for migration

JSON and Files Migration to SP Document Libraries

Netwoven performed an interim migration for the exported HipChat conversations (as JSON files) and the associated files into the SharePoint Document Libraries associated with each provisioning Microsoft Team. This is so that the HipChat content will be searchable before the completion of the actual migration to Teams. This included the following:

• JSON Conversations Data for all HipChat Rooms
• All Files exported for each HipChat Rooms

Deliverables:

1. Migrate Content to SharePoint Libraries

Migration

Netwoven migrated all of the necessary HipChat exported content into the appropriate location in the new Microsoft Teams.

This included the following:

• Public & Private Rooms Conversations
• 1:1 Conversations

Deliverables

1. Migrate Content

Slack to Teams Migration

This was done in the following phases:

Guest User Configuration, Microsoft Teams Cutover & Adoption: Prior to engaging in the migration of content, the initial phase of this project involved cutting over the existing internal and guest Slack users over to Microsoft Teams. This was essential to ensure business continuity.

Deliverables:

• Advisory support for adding Guest Users to the Azure AD directory
• Create Microsoft Teams for all Slack Channels
• Apply Users / Permissions to Teams (for both internal and guest users)
• Validate Extracted Slack Content & Download Files
• Communications / Change Management Advisory Support

Migration Readying

Before beginning an actual migration, there were a number of activities that needed to be completed. This included tool installation & configuration, final presentation, and deliberation on the migration approach & timeline, and more.

Deliverables:

• Finalize the migration approach
• Finalize tool preparation for migration

JSON and Files Migration to SP Document Libraries

Netwoven performed an interim migration for the exported Slack conversations (as JSON files) and the associated files into the SharePoint Document Libraries associated with each provisioned Microsoft Team. This is so that the Slack content will be searchable prior to the completion of the actual migration to Teams. This included the following:

• JSON Conversations Data for all Slack Channels
• All Files exported for each Slack Chanel

Deliverables:

1. Migrate Content to SharePoint Libraries

Migration

Netwoven migrated all of the necessary Slack exported conversations into the appropriate location in the new Microsoft Teams. This included the following:

• Public & Private Channel Conversations with appropriate links to files

Deliverables:

1. The Migration phase was completed by moving the extracted content from the Slack export.

Document consolidation – Dropbox to Microsoft 365

Dropbox and Microsoft 365 have fundamental differences in file storage structure and approaches for servicing personal business content sharing vs. team business collaboration. These differences typically make a lift and shift migration unpalatable because it results in duplication of files or a disassembling of the content hierarchy.

Netwoven assisted Conga with an assessment of the existing Dropbox content to determine the categorization of the personal vs. team content and design a migration strategy that will result in an optimal target information architecture in Microsoft 365 after the migration.

Prior to the actual migration, it was essential that the input, tool configuration, and planning be completed. A detailed assessment was done for content, types, permissions, content freshness, folder level depth, and content usage.

Netwoven provided the following steps as the output of the migration planning process:

• Validate and finalize migration mapping from Dropbox to Microsoft 365
• Create B2B Users for external user permissions migration
• URL redirection strategy discussion
• Identifying the collaboration data from the various data source and designing the Information Architecture
• Test migrations & validations
• Finalize migration strategy and plan

The actual migration consisted of the following steps:

• Migrate team collaborative content to chosen SPO Site Collections or Microsoft Teams
• Migrate all remaining content to OneDrive for Business
• Each user account content was transferred to their respective OneDrive for Business account
• SPO site was created for common data, where the team can use O365 collaboration features
• SPO site was created and organized for archive data in their further reference
• Distributed the unstructured data to the chosen target SPO site or OD4B
• Long path content moved to the nearest location on their accounts
• Recommended to store Large size files to Azure file share
• Dropbox permissions are mapped to the SharePoint permissions
• Demonstrated the SPO search capabilities
• Demonstrated the SPO Security capabilities
• URL redirection module was provided to redirect old, bookmarked links for internal and external shared content

Results

Through thoughtful and close collaboration, Conga and Netwoven have brought to fruition a modern and innovative content and collaboration solution in Microsoft 365 to support Conga’s employee base. The results of the approach taken have allowed Conga to use this as an opportunity to promote fresh content in the best of breed solutions and to enable future iteration. It also enabled the decluttering the older content into a retrievable structured location that is targeted for retention and eDiscovery but outside of the scope of the current collection of information.

The extensive planning and meticulous attention to detail have resulted in a high-fidelity and well-received migration/transition experience. The new solution supports a unified and high-quality user experience with a continued path to innovation by leveraging Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive to support communicating, managing, collaborating, sharing, interacting, and finding messages and documents. This has also paved the way for utilizing the other workloads of Microsoft 365 e.g., videos, news, blogs, events, web pages, comments, and more in Microsoft 365. These tools collectively provide Conga employees with an intuitive and modern knowledge management system, with consistent user experience, all powered by the Microsoft cloud.

Additionally, this new system has resulted in near-immediate cost-saving and seamless integration with other cloud applications and increased end-user satisfaction.