Updating our SharePoint service

Over the coming months, Digital Information Technology Solutions (DITS) will be undertaking a significant new project to upgrade the University’s SharePoint Service . Our current service is at the end of its life, and we are planning to move to the latest version. We need your help with this.

SharePoint provides the University with document management facilities, and support for our student recruitment and admissions processes. Our SharePoint Service is used by academic departments, professional services, staff and students, research groups and committees.

At Essex, we depend on SharePoint for our recruitment and admissions processes; to manage the administration of the student experience; management information reporting; and as a tool to ensure compliance with the Home Office and Data Protection legislation.

Our SharePoint service consists of approximately 7 million documents across these online services:

• Undergraduate electronic applicant files
• Postgraduate electronic applicant files
• Agent online services
• Electronic student files
• Electronic case files
• Reporting services (SSRS) (more than 2000 reports)
• All sites hosted under the sp.essex.ac.uk domain (over 3000 sites)
• All sites hosted on the mysite.essex.ac.uk domain (approximately 1750 sites)

What is changing?

There are four key changes the project will deliver:

1. The majority of the existing content will be moving to SharePoint Online (a cloud-based service).
2. Some content will remain on campus, split between a new SharePoint 2016 platform and a new dedicated web service.
3. The MySite service will be phased out completely.
4. The Reporting Services service will be moving to SharePoint 2016.

What do we need you to do?

•  Make sure that you have a site owner identified in your area, preferably someone with some experience of using SharePoint.
• Keep a lookout for future communications about the SharePoint project. We will be reaching out to all departments and sections with further details of the change in their respective areas.

In the meantime, if you have any queries, please send them to the SharePoint Migration Team and they will be happy to help.