Legal Information Online (LION) replatforming, Government Legal Department

The Government Legal Department (GLD) are the government’s principal legal advisers, whose core purpose is to help the UK government govern well, within the rule of law. They do this by providing legal advice on the development, design and implementation of government policies and decisions, drafting secondary legislation and working with Parliamentary Counsel on primary legislation, and representing the government in court.

GLD’s Legal Information Online (LION) system was hosted on a legacy version of Sitecore and needed to be replaced with a modern solution built on SharePoint Online. The department also wished to migrate their identity management solution from a legacy version of Microsoft Dynamics to Microsoft Entra ID.

Challenges

• A vast and complex Sitecore information architecture, meaning LION required significant analysis and restructure in order to be migrated to SharePoint Online.
• Unstructured page data requiring complex migration functionality
• Unstructured documents area requiring analysis and data mapping
• The migration of data pertaining to thousands of user profiles stored in a legacy version of Microsoft Dynamics

The Solution

• Using our bespoke migration system we intelligently processed all unstructured pages and documents, reorganising and migrating them in to SharePoint sites, pages and document libraries within the LION hub.
• Assigned metadata tags to thousands of pages and documents, ensuring users can find the information with ease
• Improved global and footer navigation using SharePoint and bespoke SPFx features
• Created custom migration system, allowing GLD to migrate Dynamics user data to Microsoft Entra ID and the SharePoint user profile service easily

Outcomes And Benefits

• The Government Legal Department can now decommission costly legacy infrastructure
• A modern SharePoint Online user interface which is continuously receiving updates and improvements from Microsoft
• User friendly page authoring experience
• A secure single sign-on experience for users from across many departments
• Improved search experience, utilising SharePoint’s managed metadata service
• High availability with 99.9% uptime guarantee from Microsoft
• Better performance with significantly faster page load times