How Respiratory Health Association's CEO led a SharePoint migration in a single day
CASE STUDY · HEALTHCARE
This is a rare case study. Not because a US non-profit adopted Cloud Drive Mapper, but because the organisation's President and CEO personally led the project. That is unusual, and it is a specific signal. In a 20-person mission-driven non-profit, every hour and every dollar spent on operations is one that cannot go to the mission. Any modernisation programme that required dedicated IT staff, a change-management workstream or a multi-week rollout was a non-starter. Cloud Drive Mapper let the Respiratory Health Association (RHA) migrate all file storage to SharePoint in a single day, retire five local file servers, close more than ten shadow-IT external accounts, and eliminate the VPN, without asking the staff to relearn a single workflow.
Implementation of Cloud Drive Mapper, and the associated transition to SharePoint that it enabled, has opened our staff up to a completely new world in collaboration and flexible work that they did not even know was possible.
President & CEO, Respiratory Health Association
The challenge: infrastructure holding the mission back, and staff who feared the fix
The CEO's own framing named two problems, weighted differently but equally in the way of progress. The technical one: file storage lived on physical network drives at RHA's offices. Remote workers connected over a VPN that dropped often enough to actively cost productivity. Sharing files with external partners (foundations, medical collaborators, event organisers, other charities) was so awkward through the network-drive model that staff had quietly begun using personal Google Drive accounts and other unofficial storage as a workaround, ten or more of them. Each of those accounts took a copy of RHA content out of RHA's control, made it hard to track, and quietly disappeared when the staff member left.
The organisational one was harder. The current system was frustrating but familiar. Any programme that felt like disruption was going to meet strong resistance from a small, tech-averse staff. Solving the technical problem in a way that felt like a technical problem was going to fail on the human one.
The solution: a change nobody had to change for
Cloud Drive Mapper's contribution to the project was specific: making a SharePoint migration feel, to end users, like no change at all. Instead of asking staff to learn a browser-based SharePoint experience, RHA gave them a mapped drive that behaved exactly like the network drives they already used. Behind that drive letter, the actual storage moved to SharePoint, unlocking modern collaboration, external sharing, real-time co-authoring and true remote access without a VPN.
The deployment took a single day. Administrative setup was quick; the CDM agent installed onto each staff computer as a routine install. With 20 staff, the whole rollout fitted inside a working day, and the buffer time RHA had built in for troubleshooting was not needed. There was no dedicated IT team involved, because there is no dedicated IT team at RHA. The CEO and staff did it themselves.
The best feedback is that there hasn't been much. Things just work smoothly, all the time, without extra steps or complications.
President & CEO, Respiratory Health Association
Results: infrastructure and shadow IT both gone
Five local file servers were decommissioned, along with their backup and DR infrastructure. The VPN was retired for the whole staff. Both were direct, planned outcomes of the project.
The security outcome was the one that landed hardest. Ten or more shadow-IT external accounts (personal Google Drives, Dropboxes and equivalents) that had accumulated as collaboration workarounds were shut down. Their content was migrated back into RHA-owned SharePoint sites and brought back inside the organisation's control. For a small non-profit handling health-related data and donor information, closing off unmanaged external storage matters as much as retiring the server room.
Beyond the technical outcomes, the CEO's opening quote captures the wider transformation: RHA's staff are not just accessing files more easily, they are collaborating in ways that were not practically possible a few months earlier. Hybrid work, external co-working with partners, real-time document co-authoring. None of it required a dedicated IT function to arrive, because CDM does not require one to run.
To me, this is a must-have for any SharePoint implementation.
President & CEO, Respiratory Health Association
About Respiratory Health Association
Respiratory Health Association is a leading US non-profit dedicated to protecting lung health through education, advocacy, support and research. RHA tackles asthma, COPD and lung cancer, and campaigns for clean air through the elimination of pollution and harmful emissions. The organisation is based in the United States and runs with a team of approximately 20 staff.
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