A Swift Approach to Content Migration: Lessons from AustralianSuper
AustraliaSuper
APAC| SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Migrating content from one intranet platform to another is a big feat of work—and doing it manually can feel even more daunting. In this session, you’ll hear about AustralianSuper’s journey through manual content migration, the benefits and lessons learned, and why it might be the right approach for your organisation too.
-
Now, Courtney, it's time for our next speaker. We've got Courtney from Australian Super. Courtney is their internal comms advisor, and today she'll be taking us through the hands-on journey of manually migrating content.
Yes, you heard me correctly. So this was a massive undertaking, and Courtney has so many valuable lessons to share. She'll give you an overview of the challenges, unexpected benefits, and maybe it'll give you a few things to ponder.
Perhaps a manual approach to migration is something that could be right for your organisation as well. So I'll hand over to you now, Courtney. Thank you so much.
Awesome. Thanks, Emily. I will just get to sharing my screen.
OK, great. Can we all see that? Awesome. So thanks.
Hi, everyone. I'm Courtney from Australian Super. Firstly, I'd just like to thank the team at SWOOP for the opportunity to present today, and thanks everyone who is dialing in from wherever you are.
I'm joining from Melbourne. It's a sunny but quite cold day, I'll be honest. And as Emily's mentioned, today I'll be speaking about the manual migration of our intranet from our former platform to SharePoint.
So let's get into it. So for a bit of background about Australian Super, we are Australia's largest super fund, managing over $365 billion of retirement savings on behalf of over 3.5 million members, with the purpose to help members achieve their best financial position in retirement. We have approximately 2,000 colleagues across Australia, alongside offices in New York and London.
And then a bit about me. I joined in September 2023, and we launched our new intranet in May 2024. So you can imagine, as soon as I started, I was hitting the ground running on this intranet project.
I'm a colleague communications advisor as part of a leadership communication and colleague connection team. And I have a passion for helping elevate the employee experience, as I'm sure many of you also share that as well as fellow internal communication specialists. And outside of work, you'll find me exploring the Melbourne food scene.
And very recently, my favourite restaurant in Melbourne did get closed down, which is unfortunate, but there's one in Sydney, so it gives me good reason to visit. So for a bit of background about our former intranet, there was a real need and an appetite for a modern intranet. So ultimately, the licence for our old intranet platform was coming to an end.
And so naturally, it made sense for us to move to a more modern intranet, and SharePoint lends itself well to that. Our old intranet had multiple levels of navigation and tiers, so it wasn't that easy or quick for colleagues to find the information that they were after. Search capability wasn't helpful.
You could type something into search, and I would describe it as a bit of a toilet roll of content that it would just turn out, and it just makes it hard to find what you're looking for. Content wasn't as always up to date. And leading on to my next point, content owners may not have always been the best-suited person in the team to own the content, and therefore perhaps weren't regularly checking that content and updating it as well.
As a result, colleagues would resort to finding information from each other rather than depending on the intranet. So asking each other about that information or where to find the information rather than naturally going to the intranet as a go-to place because it just at that time wasn't necessarily seen as a source of truth. And lastly, the fund was growing pretty rapidly, so we had a real opportunity to reflect on how we could improve the intranet and connect better with colleagues.
So how could a modern intranet on SharePoint benefit us? We have multiple reasons for this. The first thing was improved search, so that's a quick one. We introduced some search verticals, so you could actually filter down what you were looking for.
You can filter down to files, to people, to news, and we also have a dedicated vertical that filters just to intranet content. Our former platform that we were using was only accessible via desktop, and so now with the SharePoint app, you can keep up-to-date on the go, so that's nice and convenient. We introduced page templates, so this was a nice way to sort of guide our content owners in building out their pages and the layout, and it also just ensured a more consistent experience for colleagues searching across the intranet.
We introduced new roles for managing content, so we have three roles here. We have the content owner, the delegate, and the editor, which kind of links to that next point about a new content review process and added layer of governance. So we introduced a content owner, which is a single person whose name is listed on that page, and they are held responsible and accountable for ensuring that that information is accurate and up-to-date.
A delegate is someone in their team who they may trust, or should they go and leave, that's someone who can review and approve content on their behalf, and the editor is just, that could be multiple people in the team who have edit access to your page. As part of that new content review process, we also, and added layer of governance, sorry, we introduced a review date, so when we launched, we set that to 12 months from the date of the page going live, so they're next to the content owner and the page is a visible review date, and we worked closely with our tech teams to implement a few workflows. So one of those being, when we're coming up to that review date, it will trigger an email workflow to the content owner and prompt them, hey, take a look at your page, is this content still up-to-date, and if not, encourages them to update it.
And another workflow that we implemented was, with that content owner, they are the only ones who can approve changes to their page. So if any editors are making changes to that page, they can submit the changes for approval, and then it will trigger a Teams and email notification to the content owner, who can then review the changes and decide whether they want to approve or decline the change. So nothing can be updated on the page and go live without that content owner approving it.
Another benefit, we shifted to a task-based navigation structure, as opposed to our old intranet having more of a Teams-based navigation structure, and that just helps with longevity of the content as well as, you know, the changing nature of the structure of an organization. Helping colleagues globally feel connected to the fund's vision and strategy. SharePoint, being part of the Microsoft 365 suite, it just integrates seamlessly into our digital workplace, so that's a real benefit.
And finally, shout out to SWOOP, we have an ability to finally track engagement and usage, where before, with our old intranet platform, we just didn't have this ability. So our migration journey. First, I will start by saying, why did we choose a manual migration? And this is a great opportunity for me to just shout out and pay huge credit to my former colleague and manager, Laura Hamilton.
She has a wealth of experience with intranet management and intranet migration, and in her experience, there were just some disadvantages with some of that automatic migration. Another reason you might consider manual migration is it's an opportunity to really go through content on your current intranet and consider, is this really something we need on a new intranet? And also a chance to just be really intentional with your new intranet. So I'm just going to talk through now some of the activities that we did as part of that migration journey.
Firstly, starting with a tree jacking exercise. So we used a platform called Optimal Workshop, and it was a website where we could build out that tree jacking exercise, and it was about testing colleagues' familiarity with our old intranet navigation and where they would search for information. So we sent that link out to a select group of colleagues, and they would be prompted by a series of questions.
So, for example, one question may be, where would you find information on the Pride at Australian Super colleague network? And then they were presented with options that would be tiers on the current navigation. So it's about testing the route they would take to get to that information. We also did a card sort activity within the team.
So based on that tree jacking exercise, discussing where we logically think information would go under certain categories of our new intranet navigation structure. And then we also created a master migration spreadsheet. So this spreadsheet was a very extensive one.
I know that in itself is pretty manual, but we exported a list of all of the pages that had been accessed at least once in the past 12 months. And then we mapped out when the page was last updated, who the current listed content owner is, where the page lives on the site and the navigation currently. And then we also mapped out where we propose it should live on the new site.
Then we held briefing sessions with current content owners and editors. So during that briefing session, we covered the benefit of moving to a SharePoint intranet. Proposed changes we're making to the navigation structure, as I said, moving more to that task based structure.
We talked to them about introducing the new roles of content owner and delegate and editor. And then we also spoke to them about what we needed from them. So we sent them, we gave them access to that master spreadsheet and prompted them to review the spreadsheet, check what sites they were, check what pages there are currently listed against and ask them a series of questions.
So one, are you still the appropriate content owner? If not, if you know who it would better sit with, mark that down. We can reach out to them and have a conversation. Two, is that content still required? If it's not, then we might not need to migrate that to our new intranet.
Three, is the content up to date? And if not, please update it so that we can then migrate that new information to the new intranet. And then finally, mark the page either as ready to migrate, needs updating or ready to retire. We created a team's channel for content owners.
And this was our intranet content community. So this was a space for them to talk to our team directly, as well as for us to share project updates with them. And that is also where we would host that master spreadsheet for them to have access to review.
We also conducted user acceptance testing, which took many, many hours of just clicking buttons, just to make sure that everything's working exactly as we need it to, and testing out those workflows. And then finally, post-launch, we created a dedicated resources section, which is a section on our new intranet with tips and guides for the content community, because we appreciate that for some of these content owners, they might not be as familiar with SharePoint and how to use it. So that dedicated resources section includes some training materials and tips for how they can manage their pages.
So this moves us on to Migration Friday. And you probably may be wondering, what has migrating content really got to do with Taylor Swift? And it so happened to be the day that Taylor Swift had just released her Tortured Poets Department album. So it was essentially a day when all of our team came together, and it was on a Friday because we know generally a lot of people don't like to come to the office on a Friday, so we knew it would be quieter.
And it was just dedicated to learning how to migrate content and actually migrating the content. So I like to think that when Taylor was putting together the album, she was thinking that migrating content, this was exactly the music that would be ideal for that. But just based on personal experience, I think myself and the team can confirm it is really good music in the background, just as you're literally copying and pasting over content.
So we started the day with two hours of SharePoint training with an external consultancy that we were working with to build out our new intranet. And that was just us sitting together as a team learning the real basics of SharePoint. Here's what you click to create a page.
Here's how you upload files and where they go. Here's how you add an image, just the real basic stuff so that we knew what we were doing when it came to actually using SharePoint. And then we spent the remainder of the day actually doing the migrating of the content.
So we had some snacks laid out. Of course, we had Taylor Swift playing in the background, and it was just a real positive vibe and a nice way to end the week. And it was sort of a time for us to come together and work as a team to find ways to make what we considered a very tedious task quite fun and quite engaging.
As part of that migration, we created a step-by-step guide. So I've just got a screenshot there on the left, including tracking everything on that master migration spreadsheet. So that guide would include everything from check that a page is marked as ready to migrate, put your initials next to it so that we know that there's someone in the team who's working on migrating that page.
And there would also be a checklist. Are there documents on this page? Do they need to be uploaded into the new intranet? Are there links to external sites? Are there links to other intranet pages? So just getting down into that really granular detail to migrate the content. And by the end of the day, we managed to migrate 37.5% of content, which put us in a really good place to progress ahead and keep going.
And it also meant that because we had that time altogether, we could quickly ask each other questions, we could troubleshoot any issues, and we could really support each other in finding the best way to migrate content and to migrate content more efficiently. So post-migration Friday, we could independently continue working on migrating content in our own time. So maybe on the Tuesday you had one hour free.
Cool. You go back to the spreadsheet, check what still needs migrating, and just continue working away at that independently. So our new intranet, we called Global HQ, and it went live, but there's still more work to be done.
So we had a bit of a transition period from the old intranet to the new intranet. Colleagues still had access to the old intranet. However, we changed everyone's access to read-only.
So content owners and editors could no longer touch that page, as they now need to update everything on Global HQ. We included a banner on the old intranet homepage to direct colleagues to Global HQ. So I've got an image of that banner on the right side at the bottom there.
It's saying, you know, this site has now been retired, which was our idea of, you know, a fun pun talking about retirement because we are a superannuation organization. And from a risk perspective, having this overlap of the old intranet still being accessible but prompting colleagues to use the new intranet meant that content owners had some time to still download and archive all of the files on the old intranet should they need a copy for their own team's reference in future. And as I mentioned before, we also created that dedicated support section on Global HQ with tips and guides for colleagues managing content.
So what did we learn? First of all, factor in as much time as possible for user acceptance testing because while I thought that it would take some days, it still took more days than I would have expected. Finding the correct content owner may take longer than you expect because naturally people may leave an organization or they may move into another role. And if they haven't handed over the ownership of that page, then no one's sort of held accountable to check that content and just make sure that it's up to date.
So it may take some time having to ask around and find the correct content owner, but it is worth it. Three, the approach really made us focus on every step of the journey because it was so manual and we had to just really think all of those steps through. Identify which teams or individuals regularly update content so you can support them more closely in the transition.
So for instance, you might have an HR team where they need to update content regularly or in a really timely manner. I would suggest engaging with them earlier in the piece so that once you've moved to that new intranet, you can guide them through how to actually use the tools so that they feel more confident versus reaching out to your team to have to edit sort of on their behalf. Manual migration is a great way to learn about an organization quickly.
As I said before, I joined in September 2023. We launched in May 2024, and because we were manually migrating and I'm just looking at hundreds of pages of content, I'm reading everything. So I got a really good idea of the lay of the land and learned a lot about the organization.
And lastly, we learned a lot about how to use SharePoint because we spent so many hours just using it, getting familiar with it, and it meant that our team could better equip and train and support other content owners learning to use it. So this brings me to my final slide. Key takeaways are, one, a manual migration gives you the opportunity to ask, is this content really needed on an organization-wide intranet? Is that content better sitting on a team site or within a team space versus on an intranet that the whole organization is looking at? Two, as I just said before, it's a great way to learn about an organization quickly.
Three, try not to be intimidated by a manual migration because it gives you the chance to be really intentional with your new intranet. I won't sugarcoat that it can be a long and pretty tedious process and it can be literally hours of just copying and pasting text and downloading documents and uploading them, but it's worth it. It's an opportunity to really elevate your intranet because there's so much intent behind every step.
And finally, launch may just be phase one. You know, we launched our intranet acknowledging the fact that there is still work that can be done. There's always continuous improvement.
And as I've said there, you know, as a fund, we're constantly growing and evolving and we very much see our intranet the same. So despite it almost being, you know, a year to the date of when we launched, we're still always looking at improvements. So thanks, everyone, for joining me today.
And thank you for listening.
Meet the speaker:
Courtney Nuyad
Internal Communications Adviser
