Sector
Higher Education
Users
3,800+
Solutions
Microsoft SharePoint Online
The University of Surrey is one of the UK’s top professional, scientific and technological universities with a world-class profile and a leading reputation in teaching and research.
Silversands, now part of the Chess Group, continues to provide Microsoft consultancy and support to the University.
The Challenge
The University of Surrey had an existing on-premises implementation of SharePoint 2010, which provided a collaborative environment, areas for the storage and management of service documentation and general content creation related to the University’s departments.
The University implemented an Office 365 tenancy with the objective of understanding how the on-premises SharePoint 2010 environment could be migrated to SharePoint Online and what benefits would be derived from this strategic activity.
Key aspects that the University wanted to explore included:
- Identifying the value of a University-wide an electronic documents and records management (EDRM) solution for the storage and management of faculty and departmental documentation
- Determining how searchability of key content would be improved
- Understanding how collaboration within project teams would be more intuitive
- Comprehending the reduction in complexity and duplication of content.
The Solution
We were engaged by the University’s IT Services department to provide specialist consultancy and assistance to build a proof of concept (POC) in the SharePoint Online environment.
This allowed the University’s staff to test the various scenarios of interest so that they could see how SharePoint Online was a significant improvement over the existing SharePoint 2010 service.
The Result
The POC was delivered and successfully demonstrated a range of key functional areas and new capabilities provided by SharePoint Online, including search, collaboration and document management.
The University subsequently engaged Silversands to assist with the creation of a detailed design and governance framework with a view to progressing the solution to a full implementation/rollout.
Once fully implemented, SharePoint Online will allow the University to realise many benefits, including:
- Providing a common method for the creation, storage and management of University documents
- Reducing duplication of documents
- Implementing a robust yet flexible archiving and records retention environment that allows for future requirements
- Improving the ability of staff to find information more easily
- Significantly reducing the admin burden
