Migration from PHP-Based CMS to SharePoint to Reduce Maintenance Efforts

Customer

Headquartered in Canada, the company has been manufacturing and supplying tea, coffee, and other beverages to retailers, foodservice chains and hospitality facilities all over the North America for more than a century. With their offices and manufacturing centers in the U.S. and Canada, the Customer owns a variety of tea and coffee brands, pioneering innovative beverage technologies to offer one-of-a-kind products and equipment.

Challenge

One of the Customer’s brands was running a PHP-based website to offer their teas and coffees to their customers and consumers. Since the existing CMS was too complex to manage and required PHP developers’ permanent assistance to support it, the Customer decided to change the content management platform.

Among available options, they chose SharePoint to get an easy-to-use and manageable CMS. For that purpose, the Customer turned to ScienceSoft’s SharePoint developers to implement a public website on SharePoint, carry out content migration from the PHP website and tune the SharePoint CMS.

Solution

The project started with business analysis. During this stage, ScienceSoft’s business analysts elaborated a comprehensive project implementation plan and a detailed description of business requirements for the future solution, as well as developed a solution’s conceptual architecture.

Once the task was done and accepted, the project was passed to the SharePoint development team that deployed and tuned a new SharePoint farm and assisted the Customer’s team in setting up and configuring the SharePoint environment. After that, SharePoint developers migrated all the content from the PHP-based CMS to the SharePoint one.

The development team then tuned the new CMS to enable an easy management of the site’s components and content, including:

• static content and labels of the pages
• the main page carousel
• products and product categories
• brands and flavors with direct links to the online store
• sale channels and stores
• FAQ section, and more

The front-end development included the following:

• Conversion of all the UI elements from PHP to SharePoint
• Conversion of all the functionality (including geo-location) from the current site to the SharePoint website
• Website language versioning to support English and French
• Website integration with Google Analytics

Mobile accessibility of the website was enabled through responsive design.

Results

The project was successful owing to the productive collaboration of ScienceSoft’s business analysts, SharePoint development team, and the Customer’s project stakeholders. At the project’s closing stage, ScienceSoft provided the Customer with a complete set of reports including detailed descriptions of all the implemented requirements and all the development activities. The solution was deployed, migrated and tuned according to the outlined project plan and was delivered to the Customer on time.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2010, C#, .NET, JavaScript.