KCC Intranet Recovery, SharePoint Migration & Workflow Modernization

Kankakee Community College
Intranet architecture / SharePoint Online / Ellucian Experience / Power Automate / content migration

Overview

KCC needed to replace and recover its intranet architecture during a forced transition from an older Microsoft/SharePoint environment that was being retired. The existing intranet model was underused, poorly understood, and at risk of disappearing as the legacy environment approached its end date.

At the time, I was serving as a web designer/developer, but the project required much more than web production. I managed the project across departments, personally migrated critical SharePoint content, adapted quickly to SharePoint Online, learned Power Automate on the fly, and worked with my web developer from the main kcc.edu site to create supporting publishing sites including update.kcc.edu and newsroom.kcc.edu.

Problem

KCC’s older Microsoft/SharePoint environment was going away within months, creating a hard deadline to preserve critical internal content and rebuild the college’s intranet structure. A simple one-to-one migration was not enough because Ellucian Experience could surface cards from public-facing web sources, but could not directly pull from KCC’s internal network or SharePoint content.

My role

• Managed the project across departments.
• Migrated critical SharePoint content myself before the old system disappeared.
• Adapted older SharePoint knowledge to SharePoint Online.
• Learned Power Automate during the project and used it to support publishing workflows.
• Coordinated with the web developer on update.kcc.edu and newsroom.kcc.edu.
• Helped define how SharePoint Online, Ellucian Experience, and supporting sites would work together.
• Trained users on editing and publishing in the new model.

Solution

I helped create a multi-platform intranet architecture that assigned the right role to each system. SharePoint Online became the internal editing, collaboration, and content management layer. Ellucian Experience became the user-facing portal layer for surfacing key internal information through cards. update.kcc.edu and newsroom.kcc.edu became supporting web properties that allowed content to be published in a format Ellucian Experience could access and display. Power Automate supported workflow and publishing processes where manual coordination would have created bottlenecks.

Outcome

The new intranet architecture was completed before the legacy Microsoft/SharePoint environment went away. The system has remained operational for several years and continues to support internal communications, updates, newsroom-style content, and institutional information access.

Strategic value

This project required both project management and hands-on technical execution. It showed the ability to diagnose a poorly understood institutional system, preserve critical content, adapt quickly to shifting platform requirements, coordinate across departments, build workflow automation, and train users under a hard deadline.

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