How a national museum built an evidence base for successful content migration
Introduction
A national museum was preparing to relocate to a new site. As part of this move, this mid-sized organisation planned to migrate content from its long established network shared drives to Microsoft 365, in order to support more collaborative, cloud based ways of working.
While the relocation acted as the catalyst for the content migration, it also created an opportunity to address their significant volumes of legacy content. Over time, information structures had evolved to reflect historical working practices rather than current organisational needs, making information harder to manage and locate.
Business drivers
The organisation was considering engaging an external supplier to support the migration to Microsoft 365. However, the scale, structure and condition of the existing shared drive environment were not well understood. Without clear visibility of their content estate, it was not possible to define the scope, risks or realistic approach for the migration.
Key requirements
The museum needed a clearer understanding of both their existing shared drives and the current Microsoft 365 environment in order to define a clear roadmap and make informed decisions about the planned content migration.
The Metataxis approach
As records and information management experts, Metataxis was approached by the organisation to help.
Metataxis was engaged to carry out a scoping study to establish an evidence base for the migration planning. The work focused on building a clear picture of the size, depth, age and structure of the shared drive content, alongside a review of the target Microsoft 365 environment, particularly SharePoint.
The approach included:
- Analysis of the exported file system data to understand the scale and composition of content
- Stakeholder interviews to provide qualitative insights into how the environment had developed over time, including common workarounds and challenges in managing and finding information
- A review of the existing Microsoft 365 environment, with particular focus on the SharePoint structure, to understand the information architecture and governance arrangements
This combined quantitative and qualitative approach ensured that both technical and human factors were considered.
Business benefits
The analysis clarified the true scale and complexity of the migration in scope. By comparing the shared drives with the existing Microsoft 365 environment, Metataxis highlighted the level of effort required to align legacy content and structures with the target platform.
At the same time, the findings revealed opportunities to resolve longstanding information management issues and improve the ways how content is organised and governed. Stakeholder interviews exposed valuable insights into team specific working practices that had not previously been captured, helping to explain patterns seen in the data analysis and identify where clearer structures, guidance and governance could enable more effective ways of working.
Together, these insights informed the development of a more strategic migration approach and roadmap. The work also identified key decisions the organisation would need to make to progress successfully and highlighted information risks within the existing environment, allowing these to be addressed proactively as part of the content migration planning.
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