From Legacy to Leading-Edge

The Teaching Council embarked on an ambitious modernisation programme to replace its 20-year-old legacy systems — including teacher registers, compliance and certification records, overseas teaching permits, police checks, documents and a comprehensive case management system — with a modern Salesforce-centric architecture. Hubscope was chosen as our data migration partner, and by early 2025, all data migrations were successfully completed. This milestone allowed us to fully decommission our final legacy Microsoft SQL Server platforms, marking the end of an era and the beginning of a more agile, future-ready technology environment.

What was the business context for this particular project?

“The Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand currently serves around 150,000 registered and certificated teachers, working across early childhood, primary and secondary education—including both English and Māori settings. The Teaching Council’s purpose is to ensure safe and high-quality leadership, teaching and learning for children and young people. We do this by ensuring teachers are competent, fit to practice and accountable for the way in which they teach.

Our legacy systems were based on MSSQL databases and bespoke application software which was heavily customised and running on-premise with minimum support from the original Vendors. Having selected Salesforce as our Strategic partner, supported by Merkle locally, we required all core data to be transitioned in a phased manner to the new platform providing a risk adverse transition of existing data integrations alongside a carefully governed change management workstream.”

What perceived challenges existed at the start of the project?

"The data we needed to be transferred at a high quality with all historic data retained to ensure compliance with Archives NZ guidance and legislations. While we had experts on hand to support the target Salesforce platform the same could not be said for the bespoke legacy system. Upon analysis it also quickly because clear the data was stored in a highly obfuscated manner with no clues as to how to unlock just where data could be sourced from. A deep analysis of the legacy applications was performed to trace every business object back to the correct databases tables along with the necessary cross references needed to export aligned to a business context and with extremely high referential integrity. Reporting and improvement were made in collaboration with the business with many data migration iterations before the phased data migration to production began.

Any lessons learnt from the project?

“Tackle the hard issues early, repeat the data migration test runs often and find ways keep the technical teams and business teams talking”.