Tribute Technology streamlines communication and collaboration by consolidating threaded media platforms from Slack to Teams

The Challenge

Tribute Technology approached Netwoven with a common set of challenges:

• We use and pay for Slack for internal and external communication & collaboration, but we also already use and pay for Microsoft 365 and Teams.
• We expect to continue using some non-Microsoft tools for scenarios that warrant their use, but we would like to make the best use of our IT spend.
• We expect soon to expand our footprint of supported content & collaboration use cases to include a modern company intranet, and we want to ensure we set ourselves up for success across the full content lifecycle.

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

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

The Solution

Netwoven’s best-in-class Slack to Teams 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 Tribute Technology’s Slack content & usage. The data was processed, refined, and loaded into an interactive Power BI report and accompanied by a detailed analysis and set of recommendations to enable the project stakeholders to make well-informed, discerning, and educated decisions about how to proceed with the migration.

The data processed included:

• 1000’s of users
• 100’s of thousands of files
• Millions of channels, direct, and group messages

Migration Strategy

Defining a specifically tailored migration strategy for Tribute Technology was essential to ensure a smooth transition from Slack to Microsoft Teams. The thorough qualitative analysis of Slack data complemented with a detailed qualitative analysis of how users interacted with Slack 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 Slack to Teams
• Adoption & Change Management: How to ensure business continuity
• Teams Governance & Security: How to ready your M365 & Teams governance foundation
• Migration, Co-existence & Cutover Strategy: How specifically to execute the migration and transition

The defined migration plan incorporated a three-step approach:

• Initial Phase: A first phase requiring no user action and executed in the background. Employees would continue their daily work without interruption. 
• Second Phase: Channels with low usage were identified and were to be migrated and released early. 
• Final Phase: A final migration of all remaining channels was completed over 40 hours during the weekend.

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 taken to ensure a smooth and successful transition:

• Azure Infrastructure Setup: Netwoven’s Slack migration infrastructure was deployed into the company’s Azure subscription to enable a highly scalable and high-velocity migration that was completely within the security perimeter of the company.
• User Mapping: All user mappings were finalized and loaded to ensure accurate account associations. 
• Information Architecture: An ideal Team and Channel information architecture was defined and implemented to receive the content to be migrated and optimize permission management and findability of information moving forward.
• Direct and Group Messages Archive: Netwoven’s included Slack Archive app was deployed to enable a viewable, searchable, hit-highlightable archive of direct and group messages from Slack.
• Finalizing the Migration Strategy and Plan: The detailed migration strategy and plan were finalized.
• Adoption and Change Management Planning: 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:

• UAT / Pilot Migration: To begin, a pilot migration was conducted on a small group of representative users, focusing on a limited selection of content, such as public channels, non-confidential groups, and direct messages. 
• 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. A workshop was held to demonstrate the migration process and its appearance within Microsoft Teams. 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. 
• Bulk Migration: The main migration then proceeded, encompassing all channels, attachments, group messages, and direct messages. Throughout this phase, Netwoven provided daily progress reports using Power BI, enabling the Tribute Technology 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. 
• Delta / Exception Migration: Over a weekend, Netwoven completed the catch-up of all content migrated and any exception scenarios to launch the transition to Teams with minimal to no effect on business continuity.
• Hypercare Support: Finally, Netwoven concluded the project by providing ongoing post-migration support and conducting a comprehensive project debriefing. The entire project was successfully completed within 10 weeks.

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 Slack. 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 Tribute Technology with a variety of ACM workstreams, including the following:

• Awareness and Q&A for understanding and preparing for the change
• Communication Plan
• Sample Communication Copy
• Training Plan
• Training Assets
• UAT Facilitation

The Benefit

By choosing Netwoven to migrate from Slack to Teams, Tribute Technology 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 ensure 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 Tribute Technology was well-positioned for success within the Microsoft Teams ecosystem.

The Slack to Teams migration was received as an overwhelming success, enabling Tribute Technology to:

• Improve productivity
• Simplify & centralize management, governance, and security
• Reduce costs