Department for Education
Migration from Meridio to SharePoint Online
The challenges of migrating from Meridio to SharePoint Online
Complex legacy platform
DfE’s highly customised Meridio system required in-depth analysis and reverse engineering by the Proventeq team due to a lack of internal platform administration expertise.
Inconsistent source metadata
File types & extensions were incorrectly stored, requiring a deep file inspection to determine the correct file types prior to migration to SharePoint Online.
Full text conversion of image scans
Over 700,000 scanned images needed optical character recognition and full text extraction prior to migration to the SharePoint Online.
High content volume
With over 7 million content items stored in the existing ECHO platform, DfE required full fidelity migration of all content to SharePoint Online.
Proventeq's five-stage migration solution
Discovery and analysis
Migration Accelerator’s rich discovery and analysis capabilities were used to ascertain the true volume and distribution of DfE’s content. During this phase, many inconsistencies in the source content and associated metadata were identified and addressed.
Information architecture optimisation
An in-depth analysis of the ECHO Meridio file structure and metadata schema was used to design an optimal target information architecture. The source system’s folder hierarchy exceeded SharePoint’s URL length limits, which was resolved by loading documents in a shortened folder hierarchy.
Pilot migration
To demonstrate that the migration design fully met DfE’s project objectives, Proventeq carried out a pilot migration stage. This allowed DfE’s internal team to evaluate the migration and SharePoint Online document management capabilities in a production-like environment.
OCR conversion of scanned files
The scanned images which the DfE had were in a number of differing formats, including multi-page PDF files, stand-alone images, handwritten and typed documents. Proventeq extracted text from these images and exposed these as metadata thereby making the content searchable.
Full fidelity live migration
Once the DfE’s internal project team were satisfied with the migration design and target system architecture, Proventeq's Migration Accelerator was utilised to execute a full-fidelity migration with an item-level audit trail. This ensured that over 7 Million items were successfully migrated.
The Results
Smarter content and search
The DfE leveraged Migration Accelerator’s OCR functionality to convert over 700,000 documents that were previously stored as non-searchable images. Plus, it has the power to consolidate content intelligently in a centralised online repository in SharePoint.
Increased productivity
By migrating to SharePoint Online, the Records Management team at the DfE can execute longer-term plans for including retention labels and making it clearer when certain items need to be destroyed using intelligent automation. This will save on costs and time.
Reduced risk of content loss
The risk of content loss presented by the previous unsupported Enterprise Content Management system that the DfE was using has now been removed, thanks to the inbuilt content administration capabilities made available within SharePoint Online.
