Today’s blog post is a “pseudo” live blog of the May 2018 MNSPUG meeting. I say “pseudo” because I’m posting the recap in its entirety at the end of the session (instead of posting a series of short bursts during the session). I hope you enjoy the short, bullet-style recap of the meeting!

Meeting Topic

This month’s MNSPUG meeting featured several real-world case studies from user group members. Each presenter was asked to cover several key questions:

• What was the business need?
• What options did you have for solving the need?
• Why did you choose the solution you did?
• How did you implement the solution?
• Was there any ROI on the solution?

Summaries of each case study are provided below.

Joseph Satre (Carver County)

• Modernized the county jail’s invoice and payment tracking system, which is used to process invoices and receipts
• All jail guests are charged $20/day. Invoices are generated upon a person’s release
• Previous solution included an Excel spreadsheet, an Access database and a Word document. This process generated many records for the same invoice
• Key requirements: track all invoice records and payments; generate both electronic and paper invoices; and allow reports to be generated with current balance data
• Built the solution in SharePoint for licensing cost-saves. Jail services teams are also familiar with SharePoint, so adoption was going to be streamlined
• Solution enables stronger revenue recapture on outstanding balances. All accounts are flagged when a balance remains after 90 days and those with past-due invoices are clearly identified
• New solution has driven a 50% reduction in manual processing hours

Noah Spannbauer (Minnesota Twins)

• Created a centralized event-based visual solution that imports event information from multiple locations/sources: SharePoint, SQL, Excel, Publisher, and Outlook public folders
• Makes it easier for people to see relevant information and make decisions
• Leverages a custom SharePoint Framework application
• SharePoint search API is used to return events based on content type name and date range
• SharePoint 2016 calendar with color-coded events makes for a strong visual display and easy filtering by event type
• They’ve seen more ROH (Return on Happiness) than straight ROI (Return on Investment)
• First impressions of the solution have been very positive, but they still have a lot of work to do to migrate users from self-made solutions to the SharePoint visual calendar
• Their primary user adoption approach is to sit down with content owners to determine how best to ingest their data

Don Donais (Ameriprise Financial)

• Migrated 1,100+ sites to SharePoint Online in 6 months
• Restructured along the way, moving from a few “deep” site collections into many site collections with a relatively small number of sub-sites in each
• Used a SharePoint site to distribute information and communications to site owners, project team members, and the technical migration team. Also used the site for various migration reporting dashboards
• All site owners were required to fill out a survey indicating how they wanted to migrate their site. Options included: decommission (aka no migration), self-migrate (they re-create their site manually in SharePoint Online), migrate as-is (migration team would use a tool to lift-and-shift their site), and “pick-and-choose” content (site owners would get a fresh new SharePoint Online site; migration team would lift-and-shift selected lists and document libraries to the new site)
• Leveraged a rubric to determine the migration level of difficulty for all sites. The difficulty level enabled the teams to schedule migrations for maximum throughput
• Used a single SharePoint list to manage all migrations and schedule migration waves. Workflows were used to send automated site owner communications based on list status updates