Our Graphic Design Requests use a ticketing system in our Intranet and Microsoft Sharepoint for document versioning and storage. Document versioning is important to support the workflow established by Marketing and Graphic Design, and Sharepoint fulfills this need by providing “check in” and “check out” mechanisms to facilitate document handling and versioning. This ensures that only one person can edit a document at a time, and that all prior versions are available for reference (or reversion in the event of an error).
When this system was put in place, we adopted an on-premises Sharepoint solution. This means that Sharepoint was installed by UFIT on servers within their management scope, and they provided administrative services to us such as provisioning new Sharepoint sites or creating new Document Libraries. This allowed us to introduce document versioning and storage to the Graphic Design Requests process without the administrative and management overhead of installing and maintaining an internal Sharepoint instance. Since we are able to use our Gatorlink accounts to log in, we don’t have to remember yet another username and password.
As part of their long-term IT strategy, UFIT has elected to sunset their on-premises Sharepoint solution in favor of Sharepoint Online. This means that Sharepoint is hosted by Microsoft, but UFIT still has administrative capabilities in all UF-related Sharepoint sites, and we still log in with our Gatorlink credentials. In early September 2018, OMT worked with UFIT to determine our use case for Sharepoint, and determined that we would be able to make a fairly seamless transition to Sharepoint Online.
The migration occurred on Friday, September 7th, and while the transfer of assets took a bit longer than anticipated, the net result was a smooth transition to Sharepoint online. While the migration was taking place, OMT published new training videos and written instructions to help Graphic Design Request system users to navigate the changes: