With six offices located in Bristol and South Gloucestershire, Barcan and Kirby are the region’s leading law firm, having built a strong reputation for providing high-quality, common-sense advice on a wide range of legal issues.
Supported by a culture of respect and understanding, the firm boasts a team of specialist lawyers that address both business and personal sectors.
The organisation’s approach to business is underpinned by five key values. These include:
- Integrity: always strive to do the right thing whilst being honest and fair.
- Community: act socially responsible in the work they provide.
- Commercial: ensure the business is stable, secure and profitable for employees and clients.
- Excellence: deliver the best possible service, every time.
- People centred: relationships are based on mutual respect where every individual matters.
Background
As the firm continued to expand, it reviewed existing Information Technology platforms and strategies to see how it could meet the short, medium and long-term expectations of the organisation.
The review identified that the existing SharePoint platform was reaching the end of its useful life and would soon move out of official support from Microsoft. As the firm was already using Microsoft 365, they decided that it was time to migrate the existing ‘on-premise’ solution to a new SharePoint platform that would take advantage of the flexibility offered by cloud computing to drive enhanced collaboration and productivity.
The firm saw the migration as an opportunity to move the business forward, allowing employees to seamlessly share information throughout all levels of the organisation. However, to minimise disruption, the new cloud-based solution had to maintain the look and feel of the existing intranet, so it could maintain continuity and avoid any immediate demands for training.
The new solution would also need to maintain all historic security and access features given the sensitive and personal nature of the data shared within the firm.
“We really appreciated that Quiss and Circyl worked together to understand what we needed from the new intranet platform and delivered a plan that ensured we fully understood how the migration would take place. It was done with minimal impact to business operations and the new platform will better support us as we look for new ways of delivering services to our clients.”
Barcan and Kirby
Objectives and approach
After being engaged through their partner, Quiss Technology, Circyl drew upon its extensive experience of delivering SharePoint migration projects to support Barcan and Kirby in devising a plan for the migration of all content to a new Microsoft 365 cloud-based intranet.
The new solution would offer a range of short and long-term benefits, including:
- Seamless integration with other Office 365 tools such as Teams, PowerApps and Power BI.
- Single sign on for all Microsoft 365 apps
- Responsive experience on mobile and tablet devices
- Constantly updated with new features
- Secure hosted environment
As the key deliverable was a ‘like for like’ intranet, the initial project planning was based around reviewing the existing content and testing the migration of key document types to the new cloud tenancy. Following the migration testing, document security was comprehensively tested to ensure all historic access was maintained to ensure that information access replicated in the new platform.
Outcomes and principles
As the intranet was the information hub for the organisation, the migration had to be delivered with minimal impact to users. To ensure this, Circyl utilised its tried and tested Agile methodology to deliver the process within strict time and budget requirements.
The new intranet was designed to all corporate branding standards including images and site navigation. This ensured the user experience was the same as the on-premise platform with users able to search and retrieve content without any extra knowledge or training.
All content was migrated quickly and efficiently within budget by using the free SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) from Microsoft.
By migrating to a new cloud-based framework, some of the features of a modern intranet such as tailored news feeds were highlighted so that users could see demonstrable benefit from the upgrade. The new platform also gives the organisation considerable scope to build upon and create business processes/workflows with further enhanced functionality.
As the solution is based in the cloud, the customer does not have to worry about managing or maintaining servers, with all data backups taken care of automatically. This has freed up time for the in-house IT team to focus on supporting the business as it continues to grow.
Technologies utilised
During the project, Circyl leveraged the following technologies:
SharePoint: SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office, enabling organisations to manage and store documents efficiently. It is highly configurable, and solutions can be tailored to meet the unique needs of any organisations
“The team at Barcan and Kirby were very open with their goals and expectations from day one which enabled us to quickly agree an approach and deliver in a timely manner. We have a tried and tested approach to SharePoint migrations that we are very proud of. This gives comfort to clients that we know what we have the necessary experience to deliver project success. We look forward to working with the team at Barcan and Kirby moving forwards, it is a pleasure to work with such a progressive organisation.”
Roger Peacock
Business Development Manager, Circyl
Want to know more?
Circyl offer free consultations to allow businesses to discuss their productivity issues and ask us in-depth questions about our services and pricing.
Call 03333 209 969 to speak to a member of our team directly or send a message by filling in the contact form here.