MethodFactory Completes SharePoint 2010 to 2019 Migration for State Bar of Wisconsin

The State Bar of Wisconsin (SBW) is the integrated (mandatory) bar association of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. Created by the Wisconsin Supreme Court for all attorneys who hold a Wisconsin law license, the State Bar of Wisconsin aids the courts in improving the administration of justice, provides continuing legal education and other services for its members, and supports the education of law students. The State Bar of Wisconsin as over 23,000 members.

Start Bar of Wisconsin needed to migrate its Wisbar.org site from SharePoint 2010 to 2019 due to Microsoft end-of-life support for SharePoint 2010. MethodFactory provided the State Bar of Wisconsin with a multi-phased approach from Discovery and Analyst, Planning, and Implementation to ensure their migration went according to plan.

Discovery and Analyst

We started by performing a SharePoint discovery and analysis where we analyzed and documented the health, structure, setup, security model, and graphic design of the current SharePoint 2010. Our team of SharePoint engineers also reviewed the SharePoint farm, hardware, and sizing requirements and the web applications, site collections, and service applications.

Migration Planning

Once the current state was documented, we moved into the migration planning phase. Here we performed a series of deep dives into the environment; deep dive into the existing SharePoint 2010 environment and the existing SharePoint 2010 Wisbar.org frontend user experience and future state envisioning.

This phase created the new UI/UX design and documentation detailing the to-be infrastructure required for the new SharePoint, including intermediate migration servers. We also included a Brute Force migration approach where the MethodFactory SharePoint migration team would force the SharePoint migration from 2010 to 2013, from 2013 to 2016, and finally, from 2016 to 2019 while documenting the areas of failure along the way.

At the end of this phase, we created 12 documents describing the migration plan, migration errors exposed during the brute force migration, WSP inventory, details on the master pages and page layouts, UI responsive design mockups, and project budget and timeline.

Migration Implementation

In this phase, we used the knowledge we developed with the deep dives and brute force migrations and executed a detailed migration project plan. The plan included development teams fixing issues discovered with web parts, custom applications, master pages, and page layouts while the migration team migrated Wisbar.org from SharePoint 2010 into the SharePoint 2013 server, into SharePoint 2016, and finally to SharePoint 2019.

The detailed work in Discovery & Analyst, and Planning paid off with a migration process in that the client knew what to expect and left minimal surprises.