"We are proud to have worked with LFB for 19 years and the faith shown in Silversands is a testament to our expertise and ability to deliver projects efficiently and effectively."
Sector
Blue Light
Users
4,500
Solutions
Microsoft SharePoint Online
London Fire Brigade (LFB) is one of the largest firefighting and rescue organisations in the world, protecting 8.6 million Londoners and the 30 million annual visitors over an area of nearly 1,000 square miles.
Silversands, now part of the Chess Group, has been providing Microsoft consultancy to LFB for over ten years.
The Challenge
Over the years we have helped London Fire Brigade (LFB) develop many SharePoint 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2019 systems. Due to the impending end-of-life of the SharePoint 2013 platform in April 2023, LFB decided to modernise its platforms by moving to SharePoint Online.
The organisational intranet, known as Hotwire, was one of the solutions impacted by this migration. Hotwire provides organisational news as well as policies, guides, documents, and other typical intranet content.
For the past 19 years, we have been actively working with London Fire Brigade as its go-to SharePoint partner.
We have designed, built, and maintained many strategic SharePoint environments over this time, including intranets and large-scale document & record management solutions for employee records and major incident case files.
The Solution
At the start of the project, we performed a migration assessment review to map and understand the current state environment. This review and the plan it generated covered elements including technical considerations, dependencies, migration approach & planning, training requirements, project comms, content migration & go-live preparation.
It provided the LFB team with a clear understanding of what would be involved, and all the required project elements needed to ensure a successful outcome.
Through several workshops, we provided design advice, best practice guidance and considerations related to modern SharePoint structures, layouts, page templates and navigation. Following this, and to help LFB visualise and understand the new possibilities, we created a proof of concept solution to show the look & feel and key features available within SharePoint Online.
Following finalisation of the various design decisions, the new Hotwire platform was created in SharePoint Online, ready to receive the migration of the ‘news’ content. This was achieved using a scripted process to export the existing news pages and import them into SharePoint Online. Prior to making the pages live, any broken links were resolved.
To ensure that LFB’s 80 content editors understood the new platform and how to make the best use of it, we delivered training on the new components available, how to create pages, how to manage the content and how to work within a newly defined lifecycle management process.
For the final phase of the project, we migrated the non-news pages, documents, and lists, resolving any broken links and references before publishing to live.
Alongside the Hotwire migration, we also delivered two other projects; a migration of an equally significant document management system, Brigade-Wide Documents, and the transformation and migration of an employee records system, MyEmployment. All three projects were delivered fully remotely over Teams and managed by our project manager as a single programme.
"Working with Silversands has been great, they navigated our many systems to produce a new intranet on time and on budget. The team were always on hand to answer any questions we had and were so helpful as we moved through each phase of the project. A brilliant group of people to work with!"
Rebecca Burton, Senior Internal Digital Officer, London Fire Brigade
The Outcome
The move from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online provides many benefits to the brigade, the admin team and the users.
- Without the complex SharePoint 2013 infrastructure to support, manage and refresh, the admin burden is substantially reduced, allowing the Sharepoint team to focus their time more efficiently.
- Running on a fully managed and resilient cloud platform, SharePoint Online offers greater reliability than the on-premises physical infrastructure.
- As a modern platform, SharePoint Online has much richer functionality and can integrate tightly with other Microsoft 365 services such as Forms and Power Platform, enabling richer, more powerful, more productive and user-friendly experiences.
- Unlike SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Online is mobile-friendly and easily accessible outside the LFB offices. This is a particularly significant improvement for the users, as the brigade has moved to a hybrid working model.
- The advanced security available with the Microsoft 365 platform ensures that Hotwire and its data are fully protected from unauthorised access, data loss and numerous other threats.
- For content editors, the management lifecycle process is much more straightforward than in the legacy platform, making it easier to create, update and control content. This helps to ensure that information is more up-to-date and relevant for the users.
Ultimately, London Fire Brigade and its users are delighted with the capabilities, flexibility and ease-of-use of the new Hotwire intranet running on SharePoint Online, delivered on time and on budget by the Silversands consultants and project managers.
"As a content editor, I'm finding the new Hotwire to be amazing. The things you can do to pages now to personalise them are amazing and I keep finding myself coming up with ideas on top of ideas!"
User AK
