Terabytes Of Shared Drives, Onto M365. Zero Downtime.
A third-party logistics provider migrated decades of legacy shared-drive data to OneDrive and SharePoint without losing a single business-hours operation.
The Situation
What They
Were Up Against.
A 3PL with four distribution centers and corporate HQ ran their entire document collaboration on aging file servers and shared drives. Permissions had drifted over a decade. 'everyone' had access to most things, and nobody knew who owned what. They'd already licensed Microsoft 365 but were too nervous to flip the switch because warehouse operations couldn't tolerate downtime and the legal team was anxious about access leaks during migration.
Why They Called Us
The Fit.
They'd already had one failed migration attempt with a generalist consultancy. Tech Critic was brought in because of the combination of M365 expertise and a structured, phased migration model with clear rollback at every gate. The CIO specifically wanted a partner who would say 'we don't migrate that folder until you decide who owns it,' not one who would just move everything and let chaos sort itself out.
What We Did
The Work.
- Discovery sprint mapping every shared-drive root, ownership, access pattern, and frequency-of-use
- Workshops with department leads to identify orphaned data, redundant copies, and what to retire vs migrate
- Built a phased migration plan. Corporate HQ first as a pilot, then each warehouse on its own go-live weekend
- Custom PowerShell scripts to preserve directory structure, modified dates, and granular permissions during transfer
- Migrated to OneDrive (personal data) and SharePoint (team and project data) with new IA matching the org structure
- Implemented sensitivity labels and DLP rules for shipping manifests, client agreements, and pricing data
- Trained staff at each site before their cutover; ran two weeks of hypercare with on-call support per location
The Outcome
Real
Numbers.
unplanned downtime during 4 cutovers
reduction in over-broad permissions
of legacy data archived as orphan, not migrated
- 100% of business-critical data migrated to OneDrive (personal) and SharePoint (team/project) with new IA
- Three on-prem file servers retired; M365 licenses now actually used by the people paying for them
- Sensitivity labels and DLP rules implemented for shipping manifests, client agreements, and pricing data
- Mobile workforce (drivers, warehouse managers) gained mobile document access for the first time
Tech Stack
What We Used.
We tried a migration last year with another firm and ended up reverting. Tech Critic spent the first three weeks asking us questions nobody else had. And that's the reason this one stuck.
Logistics & Distribution · Anonymized Client
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