The Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV)

The Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) is the legislated peak body for Victoria’s 79 councils. Formed in 1879, MAV have a long and proud tradition of supporting councils and councillors. MAVs team of specialist staff focus on achieving gains for Victoria’s councils through advocacy, capacity-building, policy development and promoting effective governance.

MAV had their original intranet built on SharePoint 2007. After a successful integration of the 2007 platform, MAV was beginning to experience challenges in managing the organisations data on the legacy platform, this highlighted the obvious need to upgrade the 2007 platform to SharePoint 2013. MAV partnered with FiveP Australia to migrate to the latest version of SharePoint, where features such as managed metadata, enhanced search and social capabilities were required to improve the collaboration and document management efficiencies within the business. MAV also needed to develop their mobile site for a more user-friendly experience across all mobile platforms including tablets and smartphones.

The steps involved in this project included first migrating MAV to SharePoint 2010, where existing site columns were translated to use SharePoint’s managed metadata service. In addition to this, several site clean-up/relocation activities were performed. During the engagement, apart from manual ‘database attach’ migration processes, FiveP used AvePoint DocAve Migration Manager to assist with the moving of site column metadata to the managed metadata service and to relocate sites to the new information architecture.

Following a successful migration to the platform to SharePoint 2013, FiveP deployed their Engage intranet solution. The implementation of this solution immediately provided a more user-friendly responsive mobile site experience, providing paramount viewing across all web devices. FiveP’s solution, based on the SharePoint 2013 platform, has changed the way MAV’s employees work. They are now empowered to communicate, share knowledge and collaborate more efficiently on any device. FiveP’s collaborative partnership with MAV was essential to the project’s success, it ensured that the SharePoint upgrade and migration was performed as smoothly as possible, and disruption to the business was kept to a minimum.

“FiveP was successful in achieving our primary objective of upgrading and migrating our SharePoint Platform from 2007 to the current 2013. We are impressed with the successful upgrade and migration of our Platform, as well as the responsive design implementation. MAV’s users can easily keep up-to-date on readily and quickly found information that has improved their collaborative efforts.

The degree to which FiveP supported us, proactively and beyond what was expected, ensured the success of the project. FiveP understands the SharePoint platform extremely well, they knew precisely what was possible and were able to provide practical and useful advice that resulted in the right solution for us.“

Alison Standish

Manager HR & Corporate Services – The Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV)