Success Stories
Angel Trains
The story
Angel Trains initially engaged Core to work on a small project around the implementation of SharePoint 2016, including the build of new servers and migrating content. Angel Trains were impressed with the work, and signed Core up for more projects, using us as an extra pair of hands for development.
"There’s such a good working relationship with Core, it’s like having another permanent person in our organisation."
Summary
Angel Trains is a UK-based rolling stock asset management company founded in 1994.
It is the largest of four major train leasing companies in the country. Angel Trains has offices in London and Derby and employs over 135 people. The business leases trains to 17 franchised operators and two open access operators in the UK. Angel Trains has a lot of internal teams and the largest engineer database of the big four train leasing companies.
The Challenge
Angel Trains had previously worked with external partners to support their IT team.
They had a large library of technical documents which needed moving from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016, as well as other data and documents from across the organisation. Angel Trains also wanted to ensure legacy systems worked well together.
They put the project out to tender and chose Core to complete the migration from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 and convert forms and workflows to K2.
“We put a tender out to three companies and then had an initial meeting with Core,” says Simon Beale. “Core felt more collaborative than other companies. They asked us what we were looking to achieve and said, “we can help you achieve that.”
The Solution
Angel Trains bought a ‘pot’ of days from Core to have two team members work on the project for several days each week.
Core rebuilt Angel Trains’ forms and workflows so that users could work in K2. Core worked with Simon Beale, IT Development Manager at Angel Trains, to ensure users understood how the forms worked and what they were used for.
The migration from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 was more complex, as a large volume of data and documents needed migrating.
Core evaluated the content owned by each business unit and devised a set of questions to ask internally that would identify content that did and did not need to be migrated to the new environment. Migration goals were drawn up and parameters set around data so that Angel Trains could archive old documents and only migrate certain data.
To identify content that would be problematic to migrate due to file size or invalid characters, Core used a third-party tool called ShareGate and deployed it onto the SharePoint 2016 environment. A report was generated so that content owners could rename or restructure any identified documents.
This was followed by test cycles and a proof of concept on migrating the data. A plan was created to work through the data of all business units over three or four months. Data was migrated gradually, with validation and tests throughout before the cut-over date when the data in the old SharePoint 2010 environment was frozen. Users were then using SharePoint 2016.
Why Core?
“We put a tender out to three companies and then had an initial meeting with Core,” says Simon Beale. “Core felt more collaborative than other companies. They asked us what we were looking to achieve and said, “we can help you achieve that.”
“There’s such a good working relationship with Core, it’s like having another permanent person in our organisation. They come in, understand the systems themselves, and say “okay, this is what we’re going to do,” and they crack on and do it.”
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