Kristi Webb is a Senior Consultant at ThreeWill. She has over 18 years of software development experience working on software solutions and integrations for enterprise and product solutions. Her passion is applying technology solutions to solve business problems and improve efficiency.
When a customer says “this migration project is going to be transformative for our company”, it is exciting to see that they understand the power of moving their file share content to the Microsoft 365 platform. A client we recently assisted works with medical records for patients from across the globe, and we migrated this patient data as well as other typical business related data like sales, accounting, marketing, and operations files.
For this client, moving shared drive content into Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive delivered four major improvements:
Search Experience
They can search across all their active Intellectual Property, at one time. This customer is now able to check for trends and similarities across patients that will better help their clients as well as make their job more efficient when servicing these patients. It will also be easier to see what types of treatments are working as well as not working so well.
Content Collaboration
They can use the power of Microsoft Teams to collaborate around documents that various groups of colleagues are working on together. Their customers and sales staff are located all around the world, so Teams will also allow them to better manage the time zone challenges of a global organization.
Version History
They now have version history for their documents. They can see who all has made changes to a document and when those changes occurred. If needed, they can even recover and restore previous versions of documents.
Document Co-Authoring
They can now co-author documents and not worry about overwriting or losing someone else’s changes. They could have multiple people work on the same document at the same time, which was not possible with the shared drives.
The above four benefits are achieved by all our file share migration customers when they migrate into the Microsoft cloud; however, below are some additional benefits that this specific customer accomplished:
This customer really took the time to reorganize their file share content into multiple Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites, and then plan out the permissions access to the content. They aligned the file content based on factors like departments and teams that work together as well as specific processes that get completed on a periodic or even a regular basis. By putting in the effort during the planning phase of the migration, they ended up with much better organized content that is available to the right people within their organization while also properly protecting sensitive PII and PHI data. Additionally, they now have a much simpler access management system for the IT team to maintain in the future.
This customer was already using Microsoft 365 for email, and paying for Microsoft 365 licenses but they did require some additional SharePoint storage that will be a minimal additional cost each month. So, the main cost of the project was engaging ThreeWill’s help to plan and then migrate the content to Microsoft 365. Once a few other items are removed from their old servers, our customer will save significant money by retiring the old servers. In fact, our 10 week project will have a full return on investment in 3.33 months when you consider just the cost of the servers that will no longer be needed. That is an impressive ROI. And they get the huge bonus of all the new benefits that came with migrating to Teams / SharePoint / OneDrive on Microsoft 365!
If your organization still has file shares, consider migrating your files to Microsoft 365 and take advantage of robust search, enhanced collaboration, document version history, and co-authoring. ThreeWill can help.
CONTACT THREEWILL TO MIGRATE YOUR FILE SHARES TO MICROSOFT 365
