The client had 2000+ communities and 1000+ standalone sites in their existing IBM Connections. Due to cost and other dependent factors, they wanted to migrate to SharePoint Classic sites.

As per our recommendations, they accepted to migrate to the newer version of SharePoint – Modern sites.

The challenge was that ATEA had a lot of sites and sub-sites in the IBM Connections. They wanted all of the content to be migrated as-is. Though Microsoft had released Modern sites, it did not caress all the features similar to Classic sites then.

For example, Classic view follows a hierarchical structure (like site->sub-site) whereas Modern sites followed a flat structure then.

Just for this reason, we didn't want our client to go back to an older version which would sooner be replaced when Microsoft released updated features for Modern sites.

To address this scenario, we made some architectural changes to our AVAMIGRATRON (migration) tool with which we figured out features similar to Classic sites in the Modern view. Since Modern view did not support hierarchical structure, we followed site to site and sub-site to site migration technique.

Let's take, for example, Classic sites have blog templates but Modern site did not have it then. So we migrated all the blog content to Modern site pages (sub-site to site).

Even before Microsoft released many of the features in the Modern view then, we re-architected our migration tool, AVAMIGRATRON to accustom all the features as in the Classic sites.

"A whole lot of multiple migration time was reduced. They did not go by IBM -> Classic -> Modern migration. Instead, our shortest path (IBM -> Modern sites) saved their time. The client has the same look and feel as it was in the IBM Connections and the entire process was completed in just 4 months and we offered 2 weeks post-migration support. "