By Eric
Published: March 28, 2008
Updated: May 16, 2008
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Well its finally time to talk a little about the last/current project I’ve been on. I’ve been working exclusively with Del Monte Foods on their MOSS 2007 migration. WOW, has it been a whopper. Del Monte was identified by Microsoft as one of its prime candidates for MOSS 07. They estimated that by utilizing MOSS they could cut their formula change process and over all time to shelf by 33 percent.

Del Monte Foods Automates Formula Change Process to Reduce Cycle Time by 33 Percent

We’ve been working primarily with 4 main “Business Units” or “BU’s”. Corporate Communications, Human Resources, Research and Quality Assurance and Information Technology.

The good thing is that they seriously took advantage of MOSS’ branding capabilities and basically nixed all the customized sites and pages that were in their old world. In addition to that there are no custom webparts(except displaying of webparts see How to skin WebParts in SharePoint 2007). So that leaves us with just the data to migrate. Well folks that’s where the smooth sailing ends. The caveat to that is they have data ALL OVER THE PLACE. Subsites that haven’t been touched in 3 years and files that haven’t been viewed in 4 years. Half of the migration time was spent specifically identifying what was to be migrated, what was to be archived and what was destine for Davey Jones locker. Once all that was sorted out (for just the 4 major business units) we came to the conclusion of how we needed to structure out taxonomy and physical architecture. One big web app/site collection for RQS. They have over a million documents. All of which the need documents from formulas of products that were made 60 years ago. All documented, not to mention their current line of products. Each ingredient , what comprises that ingredient , how to mix that with other ingredients and so on.

Next came IT. IT was split into two groups, Internal IT and External IT. Your external stuff is for employees outside of the IT department that needed IT information. Things that consisted of passwords resets, requests for new sites, new laptops etc etc. Then there was Internal IT, these were teamsites that were used by internal IT staff, multi-department IT related teamsites, project sites, things that were basically run by and for the IT department staff.

It EXTERNAL lived under the departments section of the main home page, while IT INTERNAL lived under the “Teamsites” web app/site collection (if you’re counting that’s 3 web apps). Next came HR, HR was pretty simple, your typical documents (hopefully going to InfoPath forms), 401k info, paid time off etc etc. HR was a breeze to migrate over and it lived under corporate communications (aka the home page and company sub pages).

Rounding off the architecture was the Mysites (puke, sorry I have something personal against mysites) web app/sc, and the training web app/sc , for a total of 5 separate sections.

 

Now the hard part, all the information that existed in the old world, after it was sorted based on keep, archive, delete, was then destined to be migrated and moved around completely. It was the furthest thing from a 1 to 1 migration.

For example Document A, that lives in the Doc Lib #1 in the old world will now go to doc lib #3 in the new world and so on for every single document. You can read my post on how to migrate a SharePoint 2003 instance to SharePoint 2007 here.

The hardest part ended up being RQS. In fact at the March 28^th project cutoff date the RQS was not 100% complete. It is packaged up, and ready to be migrated over, but some organization and building of content types and such need to happen. The content types are built, the look and feel is applied to the new site, but the data has to be physically moved there.

I’m happy to report that RQS will get its day because the project was renewed for another month, which to be honest is a real testament to the kick ass team on the ground there. I saw all this to support and lift up the team that was there, and not as my own sole glory but wow we really pulled this off in a big way.

 

I’ll be sure to update you all on the continuation of RQS and the rest of the del monte project.

Until then here is a photo of some of the team.

From left to right:

Del Monte Technical Architect, Scott Smith

Eric Harlan, Pincipal Consultant for Sogeti USA

Jonathan Wynn, Advanced Technology and Collaborative Services Manger at Del Monte

Unfor. A few other KEY people that were on this project and were not in the photo were:

Sogeti Principal Consultant Marc Fruth

Sogeti Sr Consultants Kevin Chen and Chris Donlan

Seriously and I'm not kidding with out this team, this would not have happened. Period.

 

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