Volkswagen Financial Services

SharePoint Migration Project

Founded 81 years ago, Volkswagen has grown to be the largest automotive manufacture in the world producing over 6 million units a year. Based in Wolfsburg and employing 177,400 people worldwide, a strong IT system is key to running their business.

Volkswagen Financial Services already had a SharePoint system. However, it was running on SharePoint 2010 and Windows Server 2008. The support from Microsoft for those products ended in October 2015 leaving these products are officially at end of life for mainstream support. Left with an outdated system, Volkswagen understood the need and benefit of migrating their environment on to a newer version of SharePoint, and how doing so would benefit the manufacturer’s productivity and collaboration.

The Solution

This data migration project was very different from other similar projects that Dolphin IT Solutions had undertaken. To migrate the system from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016, our experts had to first do intermediate upgrade to SharePoint 2013, and then perform the next upgrade to SharePoint 2016.

Our team first transferred all the data to the 2013 version, configured the farm, and then repeated the process to migrate to the SharePoint 2016 environment. The migration had to be two step as the difference between the two versions was so wide that SharePoint 2016 had no direct support for migrating from SharePoint 2010.

Another challenge part of this project presented was the size of the data that should to migrate. Our experts had to transfer 9TB of Volkswagen’s data from the old farm to the new SharePoint 2013 farm as a first step, and then again to the final SharePoint 2016 environment. As a result, not only did our client get the added benefit of using SharePoint 2016, but also, they will have support from Microsoft until 2026.

As a final step, Dolphin IT Solutions took Volkswagen Financial Services’ old intranet, and built a new one on the new environment, adding additional features according to the business’ requirements.