TransAlta Improves its Overall SharePoint Maturity and Efficiency with Metalogix Migration Solutions

OVERVIEW

Beginning as a small, local power company in 1909, TransAlta today is a well-respected power generator and wholesale marketer of electricity. The company has approximately $3 billion in annual revenue, more than $9 billion in assets and power plants throughout Canada, the United States and Australia. TransAlta is focused on utilizing diverse fuel sources and an ever-expanding renewable energy portfolio to achieve a clear, disciplined strategy built upon financial and operating principles that are low to moderate risk.

• Reduced SharePoint reorg and migration time from 30% of the SharePoint team’s time, to just 10%
• Saving TransAlta $45,000 a year
• Cut overall migration project time to just three weeks, compared to two months of manual work
• TransAlta SharePoint team now has more time to improve its site maturity and use SharePoint more effectively

THE CHALLENGE

• Large SharePoint migration project for over 300 team sites to Office 365
• Cumbersome native tools prevented IT staff productivity and scale
• Internal SharePoint team needed more time to focus on strategic projects for greater organizational efficiency

To support the content and collaboration requirements for its more than 2,500 employees around the world, TransAlta relies on SharePoint. It began its SharePoint journey in 2009 when it migrated 30 team sites from its WebSphere Portal to SharePoint 2007. With a workforce hungry for content, the new SharePoint environment quickly grew to more than 100 team sites and 800GB when it was upgraded to SharePoint 2010 in the fall of 2011. The environment tripled again with over 300 team sites, and 2TB, being migrated to SharePoint 2013 in the fall of 2014.

To help solve its need for scale and cost efficiency, the decision was made to migrate the active SharePoint site to Office 365. This would improve capacity and ensure disaster recovery (DR) readiness if an event should impact the operation of its on-premises environment. But the challenge then became finding the most efficient method for site migration to the cloud. With its exponential content and team site growth, the company’s SharePoint administration staff simply couldn’t keep using STS ADM scripts, which was the traditional approach. They needed more flexibility, speed and management ease.

“Even before our migration project, moving content between site collections was consuming hours of staff time,” said Robert Christen, SharePoint Team Lead, TransAlta. “Using SPS ADM scripts and templates was a tedious manual task. It was time consuming to export the data, save the data and then re-import it into the new collection. Then it wouldn’t pull all the permissions all of the time, causing additional manual work. We needed to find a more efficient way.”

THE SOLUTION

With a migration of more than 300 team sites to Office 365 looming, along with imminent plans for a massive Windows 10 rollout and the move of over 20TB of data to OneDrive, the TransAlta SharePoint team began to research migration options. Manual effort would require 10 people two months to complete the SharePoint migration. Not only was the cost and time of this option too large, following the completion of the migration, it would have required manual checks to ensure quality assurance.

That’s when TransAlta looked into SharePoint migration solutions from Metalogix. Using Metalogix Migration Solutions (now Content Matrix), the same migration project would only take two people three weeks rather than 10 people two months – lowering labor cost and allowing for the IT professionals to be refocused on other key initiatives. Following a very successful proof-of-concept, TransAlta was sold.

“With Metalogix migration solutions, the process was scripted with a GUI that could confirm that data migrations were done flawlessly, including all data and permissions,” said Christen. “Since we had great success with Metalogix solutions in the past, we had complete confidence in its migration solution. It moved our data, with great speed and ease saving us hours of time and effort. We realized how much more efficient Metalogix was the first time we used it.”

THE RESULTS

With Metalogix Migration Solutions (now Content Matrix), TransAlta has achieved a significant return on investment (ROI). The solution has reduced the SharePoint administration by over 20%. This has resulted in a greater overall use of SharePoint company-wide because the SharePoint administrators now have more time to focus on optimizing the SharePoint environment for increased usage and productivity. This saves TransAlta as about $45,000 per year in external costs.

“The more time Metalogix saves us the more we can work to build out our team sites so that they can use SharePoint more effectively,” said Christen. “We now have a growing number of users actively engaged in SharePoint as a result. We’ve increased the maturity level of our organization’s use of SharePoint as a result of using Metalogix. That means that SharePoint’s value more greatly contributes to organizational success.”