ZPG's project files moved from a NAS to SharePoint.

Zone Planning Group's project files lived on an ageing NAS in its Burleigh Heads office, with copies at the Gladstone and Moss Vale offices. We migrated the library to Microsoft SharePoint, split it by year and by region, and rewrote the training material once we had watched the team use it.

The old file server

The NAS was ageing and the folder tree was years deep.

Three offices across Queensland and NSW worked from the same project library, which went back years and had been organised as folders within folders since the firm was small. Several people now touched every project, and the structure had not been designed for that.

One NAS and two remote copies

The project library lived on a NAS in the Burleigh Heads office, with a copy at each of the Gladstone and Moss Vale offices, and the hardware was ageing as the library grew.

A project library that had outgrown its folders

Years of planning work sat in a tree of folders within folders. Finding the current version of a 2019 development application meant knowing where to look, and only a few staff knew the layout well enough.

Several authors on each document

Project authors, sub-consultants and external reviewers all edited the same documents. Without co-authoring, that meant lock files and several copies of a document under different names, with no reliable way to tell which was current.

Site visit and proof of concept

We watched the team use the NAS before proposing a structure.

Our team leader and system administrator spent time in the office watching how staff used the NAS, then ran a SharePoint proof of concept on real ZPG content before sign-off.

A hardware audit already under way for another piece of work confirmed the network and the workstations could run SharePoint without replacement, and the proof of concept showed the problems with the first site structure before any content was migrated.

The site structure

We split the library by year and by region.

The first cut of the site structure put too many items in too few buckets and breached SharePoint's container limits.

The second cut split the library by year and by region, with the regions Gold Coast, Central Queensland and NSW Southern Highlands matching the three offices, so each container holds a workable number of items. Document libraries, custom lists and a small set of automated processes came in alongside, with activity reporting for the directors.

Training

We rewrote the training material to start from the basics.

The first version of the training documentation assumed more SharePoint experience than most staff had.

Staff ranged from SharePoint-native to never having opened OneDrive. We rewrote the introductory material to start with what a document library is and how SharePoint differs from a network drive, before any of the project-specific material.

After the migration

The NAS and its two remote copies are retired.

The project library is in one SharePoint site, indexed and searchable, and it opens at the same speed in Burleigh Heads, Gladstone and Moss Vale.

Files are found by search

Content is organised by year and by region, and search covers the whole library, so a planner finds a file without knowing which folder it was filed in.

Directors see activity across the firm

The activity reporting set up with the libraries shows the directors what is being worked on in each office.

The library follows staff into Teams and onto mobile

The library is reachable from Teams, from mobile devices and from client sites.

Ask us about moving your project files to SharePoint.

We can run a proof of concept on your own files before anything is migrated.

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