Soft Market Testing - Retention Management and Migration of Shared Files from Windows Servers to SharePoint

The City of London Corporation (the 'City') is carrying out a Soft Market Testing ('SMT') in relation to the Retention Management and Migration of Shared Files from Windows Servers to SharePoint.

The City will consider the feedback received as part of this SMT to help inform its options and decision making.

For the avoidance of doubt, this phase of the project is not part of a formal procurement process and the City is not committing, at this stage, to carrying out such a process.

The City currently stores around 15 million shared digital files, taking up 19 terabytes of space, in shared drives served by Windows file servers hosted as virtual machines in the Microsoft Azure environment.

Meanwhile, the City's approximately 4,000 file users have access to Microsoft 365, and thus SharePoint Online, but are not yet making consistent use of these facilities to store and manage shared files.

The wish is to analyse the existing shared files to understand their relevance to business operations and risk management, and therefore the need to retain them and to either securely delete, archive or migrate files to appropriate structures in SharePoint Online with equivalent security/ permissions so that their users can continue to use them and for certain users to be able to review and manage retention and permissions effectively and efficiently on a regular basis for the migrated files and all subsequently created files in SharePoint Online.

In realising the above wish, the City wishes to make the most of the tools available through Microsoft 365 and/or Microsoft enterprise agreement and where additional tools are required for the successful delivery, for such tools to integrate seamlessly with the City's Microsoft 365 and Azure environments.

In order to be able to achieve the above, the City would like views from the supply market on best practices, recommended approaches and necessary tooling available on the market.

The City has an estimated budget of GBP 250 000 for implementation, including the initial file retention analysis and migration, and year one costs.

For further information and guidance on how to participate in this pre-market engagement, please see the Additional Text / Information section of this notice.