Our Office 365 and
SharePoint Online Journey
Gavin Wall
Technical Architect
Fortescue Metals Group
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Overview and Outcomes
Why Fortescue chose Office 365
Our SharePoint Online Journey
Challenges and Lessons Learnt
“The future of SharePoint is Online, embrace it”
A bit about Fortescue Metals Group
Founded in 2003, we’re now the
4th largest Iron Ore producer in
the world
Fortescue exported 100 million
tonnes in three years, it took our
competitors 40 years
With our latest expansions
complete our production
capacity is now 155 million tonnes
per annum
Drivers for change - IT
Provisioning was a nightmare
Our Exchange 2007 environment needed an upgrade
We needed to refocus on delivering resilient and
elastic services
Provide tools that give people the leverage they need
to do more
Drivers for change - Business
Need to innovate to sustain growth
Physical Constraints, Desks, Meeting rooms, and onsite accommodation
Demand for a more comprehensive collaboration
environment between Perth and Operational sites
Secure exchange of data with 3rd parties
BYO Devices
Why Office 365?
Gave us an immediate answer to our scalability
problem
Negated the need for a Exchange upgrade
Lync and SharePoint for collaboration
Access on demand
Secure and comprehensive cloud solution
Beginning the Journey
Alignment Workshop
Technical Preparation
Lync Online – a quick win
No IM or real-time collaboration service rolled out
Video Conferencing facilities available, but not
sufficient
Gave us the chance to get authentication and
federation working without disrupting services
Lync deployed ‘overnight’
Since then we’ve brought Lync back on premise to
take advantage of Enterprise Voice
Exchange Online
Microsoft Services engaged for planning, preparation
and velocity migration to an Exchange Online Hybrid
solution
Deployment Approach – Rich Coexistence
Exchange Migration
Performed a gap analysis gave us the opportunity to
define our services for the first time
Communications – Branded as a Service Upgrade
Mailboxes were pre-staged, then suspended when the
transfer completed
This gave us better control of the migration cut over
Office 365 Lessons learnt
ADFS Certificate expiry and management
single sign-on
Office 365 Directory Service quota (now Azure AD)
Licensing - understand your user base
Office 365 Lessons learnt
Make the most of PowerShell and automate
Unlimited mailboxes are still limited
Adjust your Change Control processes for the cloud
Use Exchange Transport Rules to create a Yammer
Jammer
SharePoint Online
We knew we wanted a new Intranet and My Sites
We started by defining a broader SharePoint Strategy
Compared it to Microsoft’s Whitepaper on Designing
Hybrid SharePoint Environments
SharePoint – Workload breakdown
Internal Collaboration
Intranet
My Sites
Application Platform
External Collaboration
Portal
Enterprise Search
SharePoint Online
(Office 365)
SharePoint
(On-premise)
SharePoint - Approach
Focus on cloud workloads first
Leave on-premise workloads until after the release of
SharePoint 2013
Leave the Extranet as is running on premise
SharePoint Online – site collections
/ (top level)
/teams/*
• Single site collection for the Fortescue Hub (Intranet)
• Site collection per department for internal collaboration
/sites/*
• Exceptions – eg, Video Archive, Digital Asset Management
/search
• Search Centre for cross tenant searching
Content Migration
Old Intranet mixed communications/publishing with
collaboration
The Fortescue Hub needed a New IA and Governance
Model
Lots of Business Engagement
Migration tool - Metalogix
Demo
Fortescue Hub
Challenge - Keeping User Profile Data
Consistent
An overview of how it works
AD
on-premise
Dirsync
Azure Active
Directory
Profile Import
SharePoint
Online
(Office 365)
SharePoint Online Mapped Profile
Properties
Visible on edit page
• Account name
• Name
• Work phone
• Department
• Title
• Manager
• Office
Hidden
• First name
• Last name
• Web site
• Public site redirect
• SIP Address
• Proxy addresses
• Display Order
• Distinguished Name
• Source Object
Distinguished Name
• Work e-mail
Keeping User Profile Data consistent –
Option 1
Suggested by Hybrid
Whitepaper
Issues
SharePoint
Online
(Office 365)
Navigation Link
Dirsync + SPO
Profile Import
SharePoint
on-premise
Read/Write Profile
AD
on-premise
Keeping User Profile Data consistent…
Not as easy as it should be
We’re using CSOM
However – Two-way sync for Azure AD (AD-AAD)
coming soon
Challenges and Lessons Learnt
Getting our ‘Wave 15’ Upgrade
Sandbox solutions ->App Model
Sandbox in SP Online has a greater impact on Page
performance
Release Management
List throttling
‘Desktop experience’ not activated – auto extract
metadata
No published product roadmap – until yesterday
Challenges and Lessons Learnt – cont.
Pass-through authentication and Smart Links
Noisy Neighbours
Authentication lag
Office 2010 Authentication issues
Mapped drives to Document Libraries
Powershell module – damn near useless, use CSOM
Hotfix delays
1 support case a day
So why did we stick with it?
We couldn’t offer the same service ourselves
Avoid running hardware, software, patching, upgrades
No additional support contract
“We can focus on taking full advantage of what the
platform offers, rather than worrying about keeping it
running.”
SharePoint Online - Where to from
here
Move SharePoint on-premise to Azure IaaS
Enterprise Content Management with RecordPoint
OneDrive 4B for all personal documents
Portfolio Management with Project Server
Wait for Yammer vs SharePoint Social Gaps to be
resolved
Recap
Why Fortescue chose Office 365
Our SharePoint Online Journey
Challenges and Lessons Learnt
“The future of SharePoint is Online, embrace it”
Questions?
Comments?
More info
gwall@fmgl.com.au
@gavin_wall
Fortescue Office 365 Case Study
Office 365 Roadmap
How to: Retrieve user profile properties by using
the .NET client object model in SharePoint 2013
Creating a Smart Link
Install Windows
PowerShell for single sign-on with AD FS
Thanks for listening
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