A global pharmaceutical research company. 2,000+ employees. 30+ countries. A migration that had been running since 2017.
Some migrations are straightforward. This wasn’t one of them. When Cloudwell took over the SharePoint migration project for a global pharmaceutical research company at the end of 2024, the project had been stalling for the better part of a decade. Previous consultants had come and gone. Progress had been made and lost. The servers were ageing, unpatched, and becoming a security liability and hundreds of sites still hadn’t moved.
Four months later, the project was done.
Here’s how.
Why it had stalled for seven years
The company had first started migrating from its hybrid SharePoint environment around 2017. It never got there.
The reasons were familiar to anyone who has managed a global SharePoint estate at scale but in this case, the complexity was unusually deep.
The organization operated across more than 30 countries, with teams in Korea, Japan, China, Germany, and beyond.
Sites had been built up over a decade, each team working in its own way, some in their own language. And there was no single push from the top to get it done.
The mandate was clear enough; they wanted to get it migrated and quickly, but the organizational muscle to execute it wasn’t there.
Intellectual property protection was also front of mind throughout. In a pharmaceutical research environment, sensitive data and controlled sharing aren’t abstract concerns. They’re operational requirements. Any migration had to get the security model right.
The result was a project that kept starting, slowing, and stopping.
Getting control of an out-of-control project
The first thing Cloudwell did when it took over project leadership was stop and think.
With 400–500 SharePoint sites to assess and migrate, and a deadline the client was anxious to meet, the instinct might have been to move fast. Instead, our team built a model.
Rather than guessing at a timeline, we created a scheduling calculator, a formula that accounted for the number of sites, the average time each migration step would take, and the number of full-time staff committed to the project.
The model made the maths visible. When the initial timeline stretched out to late 2026, the client could see exactly why and exactly what needed to change to hit an earlier date.
The answer was a combination of standardizing the migration approach and adding resource. With those two variables adjusted, the model showed a path to completion by April/May 2025. The client agreed. The team got to work.
A migration in batches — with nothing deleted
Cloudwell divided the full site estate into batches and worked through each methodically.
For every batch, the first step was assessment: was the site active and worth migrating, or had it been sitting untouched for years? Sites that were inactive or had no engaged owner were flagged for archiving. But critically, nothing was deleted. Permissions were removed, not content. If a team came back weeks later and discovered their site appeared to have gone, Cloudwell could simply restore access. No data loss, no panic.
For sites being actively migrated, Cloudwell standardized the approach: content moved across, homepages and navigation were rebuilt to a corporate-approved template, and teams were shown how to manage their own site going forward.
Communication was handled at scale using Power Automate. Cloudwell built an automated notification system that identified the site owners for each batch and sent them a timeline — this is what’s happening, this is when it’s happening, here’s what we need from you. Some owners responded immediately. Others stayed silent and their sites were archived. It kept the project moving without chasing hundreds of individual conversations manually.
The Teams conversation most people were missing
One of the more significant shifts the migration enabled wasn’t technical, it was conceptual.
In the old SharePoint environment, everything lived in the portal. Documents, collaboration, communications. It was all in one place, because that was how people had always worked.
Cloudwell used the migration as an opportunity to change that.
Teams that were primarily collaborating internally were moved into Microsoft Teams. Teams that were sharing content with the broader organization were set up in SharePoint’s communication sites. And for most groups, this was the first time anyone had explained the difference.
It was also the first time many of them realised that every Microsoft Teams workspace has a SharePoint site sitting behind it. For teams who were resistant to working in a social space, that discovery opened a door: their SharePoint collaboration site was already there, already structured, and they could work in it without touching Teams at all.
A special case: the acquired subsidiary
Not every team fitted neatly into the migration model.
One supplier, a company that had been acquired but still operated as a largely self-contained unit, presented a particular challenge.
Organizationally, their people reported up through different parts of the business. But physically and culturally, they were together. Splitting their content across the parent organization’s portal navigation, following the org chart, would have left them feeling scattered.
Cloudwell brokered a compromise. The supplier got its own landing area within the portal — a space that represented the whole team, with their own internal navigation — while still connecting into the global architecture. Both sides got what they needed.
Solving the calendar problem
Modern SharePoint Online doesn’t support the recurring event functionality that many teams relied on in classic SharePoint calendars. For a global organization with years of historical scheduling data, that’s a significant gap.
Cloudwell’s Calendar Overlay product filled it. Rather than asking teams to start over with a group calendar, losing their history and working with a more limited tool, Cloudwell deployed Calendar Overlay to render existing calendar data in a modern SharePoint experience. Teams kept their recurring events, their historical records, and their familiar workflows, without any rebuild.
Security, rebuilt properly
With the migration complete, the organization’s security posture improved considerably.
Two Microsoft 365 features made the biggest difference. Domain-restricted sharing — which allows external sharing to be limited to specific email domains — addressed one of the organization’s core anxieties. Previously, turning on external sharing at all meant anyone could theoretically share with any external account. Now, sharing could be opened for partner organizations without opening the door to everything else.
Time-limited sharing links removed the problem of access that outlives its purpose. Documents could be shared externally for a defined period — six months, a quarter, whatever was appropriate — and the link would expire automatically, without anyone needing to remember to revoke it.
Getting ahead of Copilot
The organization was already technology-forward, they had an internal AI community sharing tips and use cases, and many staff were using ChatGPT routinely.
The risk was obvious: ChatGPT is powerful, but it has no boundaries. Data shared with it sits outside the organization’s security perimeter.
Cloudwell used the migration as an opportunity to start redirecting that habit toward Copilot for Microsoft 365, which can search across SharePoint, Teams, email, and calendar, but stays within the organization’s controlled environment.
For a research company with significant intellectual property concerns, that distinction matters.
The result
A migration that had been running since 2017 was completed in four months.
- Around 500 sites migrated or archived
- Teams in 30+ countries on a consistent, modern SharePoint environment
- Site owners empowered to manage their own spaces without raising IT support tickets for routine tasks
- A security posture built around Microsoft 365’s native controls rather than ageing, unpatched on-premises servers
- Staff moved away from unsecured external AI tools and toward Copilot for Microsoft 365
The Director of Business Applications and Analytics, who had been trying to get off the on-premises servers for years, had the project finished before his deadline. The Corporate Affairs team, who owned the communications platform, had an estate they could actually govern.
And the people who’d been most resistant to the change? Their most common reaction when they saw the new environment was: I didn’t realize it was this easy.
What this means if you're still on SharePoint 2016 or 2019
Microsoft ends support for both platforms on 14 July 2026. At that point, no more security patches, no bug fixes, no protection from vulnerabilities on systems that, in many cases, are carrying years of unreviewed content and legacy configurations.
A migration of this scale took four months with an experienced team and a clear plan. If you’re in an organization that hasn’t started planning your SharePoint 2016 or 2019 migration yet, come and talk to Cloudwell about what’s possible.