Outdoor retail leader adopts latest infrastructure, hook, line, and sinker

The Orvis Company (www.orvis.com) has 150+ years of rich history as the longest running mail-order company in the United States. Since the inception of its flagship store in Manchester, Vermont, Orvis has grown to more than 44 retail stores in the U.S. and the UK, and over 500 dealers worldwide.

Background

Staying competitive in the retail industry involves applying the most efficient systems across all levels of business operations. With the help of T4G, Orvis, with over a century of prolific retail experience, seized an opportunity for infrastructure advancement with Microsoft's launch of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. This was the third of three Orvis/T4G collaborations; all of which were completed successfully. Previous projects include Orvis's merchandise information system in 2004 and an initial SharePoint Portal Server 2003 implementation in 2006. Through these previous successes, Orvis was confident in choosing T4G to perform the migration of their SharePoint portal to the new SharePoint 2007 portal infrastructure software.

The Problem

Orvis used its former intranet system, SharePoint 2003, to assist its 1000+ users in essential inter-company tasks including internal communications, collaboration, status updates, and alerts. This knowledge worker portal was primarily used by the call center representatives and others within the organization to find information regarding product data and supporting information for customer service. Satisfied with the features of SharePoint 2003, yet certain of future business growth, Orvis was looking to upgrade to the latest product version. This would allow them to stay current and to take advantage of the new features and functionality of a MOSS 2007 portal infrastructure. Having performed some customization of the existing platform, Orvis wished to migrate to the newer version sooner rather than later to ensure further customizations would not need to be re-created. Since Orvis was also engaging on a parallel effort to enhance and stabilize their hardware infrastructure, they saw this as an opportune time to upgrade to the next version of the platform.

The Solution

T4G agreed that migration of the existing SharePoint 2003 implementation to MOSS 2007 while simultaneously upgrading infrastructure would provide Orvis with scalability, reliability, and opportunity for growth in the areas of workflow, site management and rich media capabilities. Using its knowledge and expertise with the product, T4G developed a fast and efficient execution plan for Orvis's main intranet as well as several business unit specific sub-sites, including IT support, marketing and sales sites, and retail operations.

The existing portal had also been integrated with several existing applications and servers, most notably the customized search application that leverages their active directory for staff information. These integration points and customizations by Orvis in-house IT staff required thorough planning and testing of the migration procedure to ensure everything remained functional in the new portal. Careful to define, document and automate every step along the way, T4G implemented custom migration processes to solve the issues and discrepancies that occurred during the migration process. This allowed T4G to implement a repeatable, testable solution to the migration, with each round of testing running through a complete migration of the portal content.

Through proper planning and thorough documentation, T4G was successful in performing the migration while maintaining existing functionality and making incremental improvements through simplified administration. Using pre and post counts of all content, followed by a thorough knowledge transfer of the environment, T4G migrated the SharePoint portal accurately and efficiently. With a keen eye for detail and consideration for the clients ease of usability, T4G also implemented a customized and eye-pleasing themed interface, readily applicable to future sites and add-ons.

Lessons Learned

Upon evaluation, the project emphasized the importance of process documentation and solid knowledge transfer, as well as communication and commitment from the client. The focus on developing repeatable processes for site migration (which included managing the database of over 25GB) was incredibly valuable and a key component to the project success.

Another key lesson learned was how to approach the issue of customizations throughout an existing portal. For example, in the previous portal solution, Orvis had developed a customized "recycle bin" approach to documents to overcome a shortcoming of SharePoint 2003. MOSS 2007 removes that need; however, the previously recycled documents would need to be processed to utilize this new feature. T4G developed, as part of its repeatable approach, a recursive process to handle this and any other issues that had to be solved on each piece of content within the existing portal. This approach allowed T4G to quickly handle issues with the migration by applying new rules to this process as issues were discovered, and also provided a level of reliability by its thorough approach of processing each item in the portal hierarchy individually.

The Benefits

The full cycle engagement was delivered within budget and on time (eight weeks); the success of the migration was visible instantaneously. Among the other advantages of the upgrade were improvements to site security and Microsoft Office integration; site administrators had the ability to control web content publishing; users were immediately able to setup email alerts and create custom list views.

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