A foundation off Dropbox, Google, and on-premise file shares. A Tech Ambassador program that is still running.

25+ departments consolidated onto a single governed Microsoft 365 tenant.

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The situation

The situation we walked into.

RWJF is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world. Their content lived in five places at once: Dropbox, Google Drive, Zoom, on-premise file servers, and SharePoint and OneDrive. The overhead was draining IT, the security posture was hard to defend, and the knowledge management function was working uphill against a content layer that had grown by accumulation. The foundation had E5 Microsoft 365 licenses already paying for capabilities nobody was using. Leadership wanted the post-Covid hybrid workforce to have one place to work, not five.

What we did

What we did.

We had been working with RWJF since 2019, supporting their emerging knowledge management function and the enterprise search capability built on Microsoft Search. So the migration was not the start of a relationship. It was the natural next chapter.

The engagement ran for a year. We mapped every content source onto Microsoft 365 using Sharegate, and we did it with RWJF’s KM team and IT team in the room, not over their heads. The content analysis told us where each type of file belonged: which workstreams should live in SharePoint, which in Teams, which on OneDrive. We defined the migration scope, the schedule, and the quality criteria up front, then worked through it department by department.

Change management was not a phase tacked onto the end. It was the whole engagement. Stakeholder interviews, surveys, and workshops to surface what each department actually needed and feared. A communication plan and training plan tailored to the rhythm of the foundation. User-friendly self-help guides and engaging messaging that the RWJF team folded directly into their internal communications. We brought every department through pre-migration consultations and post-migration follow-ups, so nobody got dropped onto a new tool without context.

We built RWJF a digital workplace landing page in SharePoint, branded to their values and goals, that served as the one-stop shop for everything the new environment offered: a dashboard, a news feed, quick links, a clean navigation menu. We customized the Microsoft Search experience, the filters, and the facets, then enabled the analytics and reporting that let the KM team monitor performance and improve over time.

And we stood up a Tech Ambassador program. One representative from every department. The program met monthly during the engagement and was designed to outlive us.

What changed

What changed.

Twenty-five-plus departments migrated successfully off Dropbox, Google Drive, and on-premise file servers onto a single Microsoft 365 tenant. The foundation hit a 60% M365 Adoption Score within the first year, with Content Collaboration at 59 out of 100 and Mobility at 61 out of 100. The department adoption scorecard showed broad uptake across the organization: five departments rated “A” for strong adoption, fourteen rated “B” for moderate adoption. The Tech Ambassador program launched with representation from every department. The team piloted Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention and sensitivity labels with end users; the majority of pilot participants reported that the notifications were genuinely useful for raising awareness of sensitive information. The foundation also has a Digital Workplace Governance Charter, data management policies, defined M365 governance roles, an optimized Microsoft Search experience, and an enterprise taxonomy that the KM team continues to evolve.

The human moment

We received tons of positive staff feedback on the approach Ideal State used to migrate us to M365. Not only could we not have done it without them, but we truly enjoyed working side-by-side with their capable team every step of the way.

Rafael Maldonado, VP Information Technology, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

What sticks

What sticks.

The Tech Ambassador program is still running. It met monthly during the migration and never stopped. New cohorts of staff are trained inside it. The governance charter, data management policies, and M365 governance roles are owned by the foundation’s IT and KM leadership, not by us. The enterprise taxonomy and Microsoft Search customization continue to evolve as the KM team refines them. Our ongoing partnership has moved on to metadata management, data protection optimization, and the evolution of enterprise search for Copilot. The infrastructure we built keeps producing value, and the people we trained keep producing the infrastructure.

Lessons we carried forward

Lessons we carried forward.

RWJF taught us that the Tech Ambassador model is the most durable artifact a migration engagement can leave behind. The tooling will evolve, the policies will be rewritten, but the cross-departmental group that owns the practice does not depreciate. That cohort is the current generation of the Trailblazers Program we now run in every Transform365 engagement. The other lesson: knowledge management is not the cleanup after the migration. It is the work. Every engagement since has carried that conviction more visibly into the scope.

Connect with us

Have an environment that grew by accumulation?

RWJF started with a discovery call where the conversation was about content sprawl, but the work that followed was about the people and the practices around the content. A 30-minute call with one of our co-founders is a good place to start. No deck. No consultant-speak. No pressure.

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