The Coast Guard plans to soon begin migrating the Coast Guard Portal (CG Portal) to a secure cloud-based environment that users will eventually be able to access from mobile and personal devices.
The C5I Service Center (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber and Intelligence) estimates it will take at least a year to relocate the CG Portal to DoD365 SharePoint online, but the upside will be huge. The DoD365 environment is a suite of shared apps used by all branches of the military that enhances cooperation and provides access to more modern tools and templates.
Sounds great. Do I need to do anything?
The process is largely automated, but the C5ISC has asked site owners and content owners to do the following to get their sites ready:
- Verify site ownership
- Remove legacy content from sites
- Clean up content and remove unnecessary data
- Validate permissions for the site collections they manage
- Validate the need to retain any Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
What if I haven’t started yet?
The initial clean-up deadline was Dec. 3, 2021. C5ISC provided emails with details on how to do this. Once you’ve verified that you’re the site owner, you can start the clean-up. Site owners will be contacted at least two weeks prior to the start of migrations of their site collections. If you need more time, contact OSC-CGPortalMIG@uscg.mil
Oops. I accidentally deleted some data. Where can I go if I have questions?
C5ISC has set up a Frequently Asked Questions here. You can also go here for more information. The team has also created an issue tracking tool that is now ready for use. If you have a question, please enter an issue in the tracking tool at: SharePoint Migration Issue
When is my site scheduled to be migrated? Will I be notified?
Trials are being conducted in December, with actual migrations to follow in January. Site owners will be notified two weeks prior to migration. This will be done from an app on the Coast Guard portal. The Coast Guard Portal Migration Team is committed to making this transition as seamless as possible and has scheduled migrations to minimize disruption, with the least complex sites being moved first.
How long will it take to migrate my site?
It will take approximately four weeks before your site content is fully migrated and available on SharePoint online. During that time, you will still have access in a read-only mode, except for one to two days in the second week when your site is being migrated in preparation for site user acceptance testing. Upon completion, site owners will receive confirmation that their sites and data have been migrated, along with steps to verify content was relocated successfully. A new splash page will be added to your old site collections to redirect users to your new presence on SharePoint online.
Will the new CG Portal look different?
The new Coast Guard portal will have a more modern template, but largely look and feel the same. There is a plan to flatten the current structure and site collections will have the ability to associate with one of five hubs: Atlantic Area, Pacific Area, DCMS (Mission Support), DCO (Operations) and Direct Support.
Site owners are not required to associate with a hub site and will be fully functional without it.
Anything else I need to know?
For more information, go to these links.
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