A premier financial services company consolidates communication and collaboration by migrating from Jive to M365

The Challenges

The company approached Netwoven with a common set of challenges:

• We use and pay for Jive as a “work out loud” environment for collaboration and social, but we also already use and pay for Microsoft 365 and Teams.
• Presence of multiple platforms is not to our advantage and needs consolidation.
• Strategic alignment with Microsoft as content & collaboration partner of choice should pave the way for future Intranet modernization plan.
• Significant expenses towards Jive licensing cost.

The problem statement in summary was - How can we maintain business continuity, avoid overpaying for overlapping technologies, and provide a streamlined experience to employees that enables our future roadmap of digital workplace innovation?

The Solution

This problem statement prompted the stakeholders to look for a more integrated and cost-effective platform and moving to Microsoft 365 came as a natural choice.

Netwoven’s best-in-class Jive to M365 migration service included the following workstreams:

• Content Discovery & Assessment
• Migration Strategy
• Migration Readying
• Adoption & Change Management
• Migration Execution
• Go-Live & Hypercare Support

The highlights of each important workstream are provided below.

Content Discovery & Assessment

Netwoven led a detailed inventory & assessment of company’s Jive content & usage. Using proprietary tools, Netwoven extracted Jive data and usage logs. The data was processed, refined, and loaded into an interactive Power BI report. A detailed analysis was performed, and a set of recommendations were prepared. This enabled the project stakeholders to make well-informed, discerning, and educated decisions about how to proceed with the migration. A set of representative Places were selected to be built in M365 as proof of concept.

The top-level findings are given in the table below.

Some of the recommendations made were:

• A significant number of personal Spaces was found to be unused. They were decided not to be migrated along with Spaces for the people who have left the company.
• Jive Core contains lots of metadata, place information, logo images, user profile images, etc, which are not very useful and hence they were not to be migrated.
• Content Type data (rich text / html) is minimal compared to binary file data, and so is not very relevant for migration scoping.

Such data driven practical considerations significantly reduced the size and scope of the project improving relevance and efficiency.

Migration Strategy

Defining a specifically tailored migration strategy for the company was essential to ensure a smooth transition from Jive to Microsoft 365. The thorough qualitative analysis of Jive data complemented with a detailed qualitative analysis of how users interacted with Jive supported the prioritization of critical content to migrate and the determination of the most effective migration strategy.

Netwoven used this information to prepare for and lead a series of workshops to address the following topics and tracked all decisions made in the Migration Decision Tracker:

• Content Inventory: What to migrate and what to leave behind
• Migration Mapping & Information Architecture: How to map Jive components to M365 (Viva Engage, SharePoint and Teams)
• Adoption & Change Management: How to ensure business continuity
• M365 Governance & Security: How to ready your M365 governance foundation
• Migration, Co-existence & Cutover Strategy: How specifically to execute the migration and transition

All decisions were synthesized into a final migration strategy & plan that was reviewed and agreed upon by the collective project team before proceeding.

Migration Readying

Before initiating the migration, several critical steps were undertaken to ensure a smooth and successful transition:

• Migration phase infrastructure initialization
• Document detailed migration strategy
• Identify Place Owners (Decision Makers)
• Ready Migration Mapping Platform
• Migration Mapping of all Spaces to M365 containers
• Create target layouts and design
• Finalize migration test scripts
• Ready UAT capture platform
• Automated test script development
• Complete Decision Tracker
• Finalize a tailored and comprehensive adoption and change management plan for the successful transition

Migration Execution

After completing the migration readying workstream, the migration was executed as follows:

• Prototype Migration: To begin, a prototype migration was conducted by identifying certain representative Jive places. UAT was done by select set of users and issues and remediation of issues were discussed with the stakeholders
  Deliverable: Completed Test Migration Reports
• UAT / Pilot Migration Review and Recalibration: To address potential technical challenges, rigorous pilot testing was conducted to ensure the migration process was efficient and minimized risks. Formal documentation was made for UAT Components, UAT Process, UI and Communications. UAT Office hours sessions were conducted to collaborate with the users conducting the UAT. Workshop was held to demonstrate the migration process and final review of UAT & issue tracking with Core Team. This workshop proved invaluable in helping stakeholders and the IT team understand the process and identify any potential limitations. During this phase, the migration scripts were thoroughly validated, benchmarked, and fine-tuned to achieve optimal performance. The pilot migration helped identify and address potential issues, ultimately accelerating the overall migration process.
  Deliverable: UAT Summary Findings & Readout
• Bulk Migration: The main migration then proceeded, encompassing PDF archive migration, provisioning target workspaces, active and archive migration, URL link updates in native content types. Throughout this phase, Netwoven provided daily progress reports using Power BI, enabling the project team to easily track the migration status. Netwoven also collaborated closely with the customer's project managers for status updates and the decisions required during the execution. 
  Deliverable: Completed Production Migration Report
• Delta / Exception Migration: This was the final phase of migration. A blackout window was defined and Netwoven completed the migration of final Jive extract. It also included implementing the URL redirections. The go-live announcement was made and the team stood by for any issue resolution on 24x7 basis.
  Deliverable: Go live announcement
• Hypercare Support: Finally, Netwoven concluded the project by providing post-migration support and handholding client's help desk team to take over after conducting a comprehensive project debriefing. The entire project was successfully completed within 22 weeks. 
  Deliverable: Migration as Implemented Document

Adoption & Change Management

Successful migration projects are not just about moving content from one place to another. Transitioning platforms requires concerted focus and effort to ensure that all the users using the system can transition with minimal impact to business continuity. This is especially important when moving from a well-adopted and loved platform like Jive. It is important to make sure the users feel heard, have their concerns addressed, are kept well aware, and have the tools and information they need to smoothly navigate the change.

Netwoven assisted the company with a variety of ACM workstreams, including the following:

• Awareness and Q&A for understanding and preparing for the change
• Communication Plan and copies of Communication
• Training Plan
• Training Assets
• Document Link Update limitations for Discussions
• Document the plan for handling the Migration Exceptions
• Document what the White Glove Service is
• Define & Document Co-existence Experience & Recommendations
• Permissions Promotion for Spaces Documentation & Report
• Document URL Redirection Plan
• Deliverable: UAT Summary Findings & Readout

The Benefit

• By choosing Netwoven to migrate from Jive to M365, the company achieved the following.
• A highly secure transition of infrastructure, data, and application across the platforms.
• Minimized risks and transition time owing to proven methodology, reusable assets, and global delivery support from Netwoven.
• The technical know-how and the domain expertise of Netwoven ensured quick resolution of technical issues.
• Adoption by the users was facilitated by the large library of training and change management content for ongoing project support​.

By combining technical expertise with a clear plan for managing the change and ensuring user adoption, Netwoven ensured that data integrity was maintained, organizational workflows remained uninterrupted, and company was well-positioned for success within the Microsoft ecosystem. 

The Jive to M365 migration was received as an overwhelming success, enabling the company to:

• Improve productivity by enabling the community to have uniform user experience and easier day to day operations
• Simplify & centralize management, governance, and security of data and operations

Reduce costs