City of Westminster College smoothly upgrade to SharePoint 2010
City of Westminster College is a leading Further Education institution based in central London. Offering over 250 academic, vocational and professional courses to students aged 16-18 and to adults wishing to re-train or improve their skills. The state-of-the-art Paddington Green Campus, a world-class £102m building designed by leading architects opened in January 2011 and has the capacity for over 3,000 students. An inspiring location providing formal and informal learning spaces for studying in the heart of the capital.
The College upgraded their current installation of SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 to take advantage of some key new features within 2010. The College uses SharePoint as a document repository for all student correspondence and this is linked to their central student database.
Working with Parabola, the College planned for the SharePoint 2010 upgrade to take place over the Christmas period when it was closed and the least disruption would be caused. The initial review and fact finding of the current landscape, the planning of the upgrade and the design and build of the new farm took place in the three months prior to the Christmas period. To further minimise disruption the first step taken by Parabola was to freeze the current SharePoint 2007 deployment, this allowed "read only" access to files and information during the upgrade process and as such reducing the downtime window. Having worked with the College and meticulously planned and tested the upgrade process, Parabola was able to complete the migration over the Christmas period, in fact the upgrade was completed within just four days.
Richard Gray, Managing Director, Parabola explained; "In an organisation of this size people become heavily dependent upon SharePoint and its therefore vital to design the new 2010 farm for their future needs and to mitigate the risks to minimise any downtime. However, having been through the 2007 to 2010 upgrade process several times before, we knew what to expect and how to resolve the issues that inevitably arose."
Since the upgrade, College staff members are enjoying a faster system and many have commented positively about the new interface found on SharePoint 2010. In the coming months, the College team is aiming to implement intelligent workflows to continue to make current processes even more efficient and continue to get best value from the system.