Hydro Jumps to Office 365 with AvePoint Migration Services and Solutions

Hydro is an aluminium company with 35,000 employees in 40 countries on all continents, combining local expertise, worldwide reach and unmatched capabilities in R&D. Hydro is present within all market segments for aluminium, with sales and trading activities throughout the value chain.

Based in Norway and rooted in more than a century of experience in renewable energy, technology and innovation, Hydro is committed to strengthening the viability of its customers and communities, shaping a sustainable future through innovative aluminium solutions.

Critical Needs

• Migration of existing SharePoint settings and configurations to new environment
• Zero downtime during SharePoint site migrations

The Challenge

Hydro decided to migrate to Office 365 immediately following the end-of-life announcement for SharePoint 2010. To avoid as much extended support as possible, they set a 12-month timeline for the project from discovery to launch.

Hydro immediately knew a third-party solution would be a necessity to meet their requirements which included:

• Timeline: Considering their internal IT team had four people and they were tasked with migrating more than 1,000 sites, a 12-month timeline was a pretty tight turn around.
• Settings & Configurations: As one can imagine, having 13,000 users live in a SharePoint 2010 for more than eight years results in numerous special settings and configurations that become critical to the business. A vital part of their migration was to bring these over as accurately as possible.
• Uptime: With so many employees continuously working within SharePoint, it was business critical to keep service disruption at an absolute minimum.

My advice for those looking to migrate into Office 365 is to make sure you evaluate your solution provider. We have seen tools and service teams that don’t work. The tool is clearly essential, but make sure the migration services are also up to par. We highly recommend using AvePoint.

Chahid Bibi
Application Manager Hydro

The AvePoint Solution

After evaluating multiple leading migration solutions, Hydro decided that AvePoint DocAve Migrator checked all their requirements, but also provided a top-notch services department.

”Our main reason for choosing AvePoint was the quality and proof of concept,” said Chahid Bibi, Application Manager, Hydro. “We looked at the market and saw that AvePoint’s tool was very capable. The AvePoint team know how to do their job and we were extremely satisfied.”

Project Manager Viktor Homola, had previous experience with migrations and understood that much of their legacy content would need to either be archived or discarded.

After using AvePoint’s Discovery Tool, Hydro decided to discard 233 sites and archive 340 sites. This left 661 user-accessible sites and 550 gigabytes to be migrated intro SharePoint Online

For Hydro’s IT team, AvePoint Services was a value add and force multiplier. Rather than invest their time to become experts in every facet of a migration, which would be a temporary need for the organization, they decided to manage the project with the help of the AvePoint services team.

“I think it is a great achievement that our small team, supported by AvePoint, achieved our goal to have all of our content migrated, with as many settings as possible, and user mapping with no disruption,“ said Viktor Homola, Project Manager, Hydro.

The Road Ahead

Now that Hydro has migrated fully into Office 365, they have decided to embrace the whole suite of applications including Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Groups, Power BI, and more.

They have found their users are already adopting and tackling these additional applications and have already created over 150 active Groups.

With the high level of satisfaction brought by this recent migration into the cloud, Hydro plans to continue working with AvePoint to execute a tenant to tenant migration as a result of a recent acquisition.

After working closely with AvePoint Services, Viktor confidently claim this was the best part of working with AvePoint.

“To me, the sign of a very well managed service organization is when the handover of projects goes without any issues.” said Viktor.

Final Thoughts: “My advice for those looking to migrate into Office 365 is to make sure you evaluate your solution provider. We have seen tools and service teams that don’t work. The tool is clearly essential, but make sure the migration services are also up to par. We highly recommend using AvePoint,” said Chahid.