RPC Gains Visibility, Enhanced Team Knowledge and Business Value with SharePoint 2010 Upgrade

Challenge

RPC was first introduced to Abel Solutions in 2007 when they sought guidance on upgrading from a rigid, outdated intranet to SharePoint (SP) 2007. Although the company chose to use in-house resources to perform what proved to be a lengthy migration process, their relationship with Abel Solutions as a trusted partner continued to develop with Abel Solutions receiving subsequent invitations to perform proof-of-concept tests and assist with other projects.

When RPC was ready to upgrade to SP 2010, the firm immediately looked to Abel Solutions. "Abel Solutions performed an upgrade assessment for us in November 2010," says RPC Director of Project Management Ron Gray. "It showed that in just seven weeks they could convert our environment and get it running."

Solution

RPC initially ordered the SP 2010 Assessment from Abel Solutions as a quality control check. According to Gray, “We had done our own internal assessment of how the upgrades would work. We wanted Abel Solutions to verify what we had learned.” Gray says that Abel Solutions not only provided important verification, but it also “provided better documentation [regarding the migration path and process] than what we could have produced internally.”

Since the implementation of SP 2007 the firm has seen “widespread adoption across the enterprise” and the assessment confirmed that RPC's SharePoint environment had become much more complex over time – with the addition of numerous service applications and custom integrations, specialized content databases and workflows, and other elements. RPC was cautioned that extreme diligence and extensive testing would be required to successfully complete their migration.

This better documentation—and a thorough assessment of their needs and environment—led RPC to secure the services of Abel Solutions for help with a full-scale migration from SP 2007 to SP 2010, plus training of their personnel.

The now revised 10 week migration called for Abel Solutions leadership to work alongside RPC staff on everything from cleaning up the existing farm and creating and configuring the new SP 2010 farm to final testing and documentation of upgraded content, customizations, disaster recovery and other processes. In addition Abel Solutions recommended running a test deployment of the planned migration in a development environment in Houston during the same 10-week window.

"We were confident we could do [the upgrade] in-house, but not at the pace we required," says Gray. "Abel brought seniority to the project. We have a very young team and that seniority helped."

Results

Gray says the upgrade was a complete success with no downtime and expects business units to continue to find new ways of using SP 2010. For example, one powerful benefit the IT department has embraced, Gray says, is the way SP 2010 has helped the department aggregate, structure and make visible its content. “Our IT department has mapped out all the technical services we provide our employees and these services are clearly defined and explained on our IT home page. We can go to a specific service and find related items, such as architectural diagrams, installation guides, notes, Service Desk incidents, and enhancement requests, and even the cost of that service,” he says. “Employees can see the whole profile of the service we offer and that is something that never existed before.”

RPC's original plan was to migrate and then work on the next stages, but according to Gray, “As each business unit migrated, they would see benefits and immediately start asking for more.”

With the successful upgrade and RPC’s continued rapid adoption of the platform, opportunities for improving businesses processes with SharePoint at RPC are everywhere. Already the company has contracted with Abel for another SharePoint project, utilizing InfoPath forms, plus they have pending initiatives for Business Intelligence, building an extranet for vendors and customers, and personalizing sites so that users are identified by role and targeted for specific data.

Gray says Abel Solutions will be alongside them every step of the way. “Our relationship with Abel Solutions has always been positive, so they would be the first we would reach out to,” he notes.