Virginia Beach City Public Schools SharePoint Migration & Intranet Redesign

SharePoint Migration

Challenge

VBCPS was in need of a trusted partner to assist with the migration of their current SharePoint 2013 (on premises) intranet to SharePoint Online. With a shift away from the on premises configuration hosted on VBCPS servers, they could realize all the benefits of SharePoint without having to manage server updates or patches, manage local backups, or worry about keeping SharePoint up to date with the with latest features from Microsoft. They were also looking for a long-term, scalable solution that could handle future growth.

Solution

For a project this large, the key to success is upfront planning and analysis. Marathon developed a plan and roadmap to guide the project, as there was a strict deadline of finishing the migration before school started back up in the fall. Marathon worked with VBCPS employees to fully understand the scale of their current site and plan out the mapping of content from source to destination. Using the Quest Content Matrix migration tool, Marathon migrated over 2TB of content to the VBCPS SharePoint Online tenant for all schools in the division.

In conjunction with the migration to SharePoint Online, Marathon worked with VBCPS staff to redesign their Intranet to give it a new, modern look and feel. The updated SharePoint branding includes the use of a fully customized mega menu for ease of navigation across the large SharePoint tenant. The refresh also included a fully functional mobile experience using Bootstrap and SharePoint Online Classic UI Master Page.

During the migration to SharePoint Online, Marathon also migrated existing SharePoint custom C# web parts to new SharePoint Framework client-side web parts. These client-side web parts use a custom-developed REST API hosted on the VBCPS network to integrate with internal systems to facilitate user interaction with internal VBCPS systems and databases.