Discovery & Analysis
Migration Accelerator’s discovery and pre-migration analysis reports helped to identify potential migration issues, decide on the most suitable migration strategy and helped establish an effective target information structure. This allowed us to identify potential issues when migrating from FileNet to SharePoint: compound documents and multi-content documents within FileNet; invalid characters in folder and file names that are not compatible with SharePoint; duplicate item names, long item names and item names having no extensions; differing Mime types across document versions; unfiled documents and too many child items in containers or folders and invalid file types and checked-out files.
Information Architecture Optimisation
As content was spread across object stores due to FileNet’s storage and information structure limitations, our team arranged a workshop to develop a full understand of DLF’s organization structure and different functions to decide the target information architecture structure and security model. At the highest level, DLF had Corporate, Subsidiaries, Promoters and Projects functions which have their own departments, companies and sub functions to manage the respective business operations. We proposed a target information structure to match DLF’s organisational structure and functions. To secure the content in this new target information structure, we created SharePoint groups based on different DLF user entities; allowing permissions to be applied at granular level by adding these groups in site collections, libraries and folders along with respective permissions. To secure the content in this new target information structure, we created SharePoint groups based on different DLF user entities; allowing permissions to be applied at granular level by adding these groups in site collections, libraries and folders along with respective permissions. As the target structure and security model was complex to configure and deploy in SharePoint, our team developed an automated provisioning tool for faster and accurate deployment.
Migration Design And Configuration
Migration Accelerator’s custom content classification and target structure mapping feature addressed the requirement to classify the content accurately and migrate related documents together into site collections and document libraries in SharePoint Online. By following this procedure, we expedited migration to SharePoint Online with the ability to migrate all relevant metadata.
Pilot Migration
To demonstrate to DLF’s team how the production migration would work and give an opportunity to test existing data in a production-like SharePoint environment, our migration team carried out a pilot migration exercise. To achieve this, we mapped content from one of IBM FileNet’s object stores by applying necessary target information structure, classification and metadata rules, and migrated to specific site collections, document libraries and folders in SharePoint Online.
Incremental Live Migration
Following a successful pilot migration, we utilised Migration Accelerator’s incremental migration features to stage the production migration process. This means that the impact to DLF’s business processes were minimised. Our team set up additional migration rules to consolidate and classify the high volume of source content types using PowerShell extensions. These rules were used to map respective content types and metadata in SharePoint. Metadata values were then transformed to comply with SharePoint restrictions, based on metadata rules, to handle invalid characters and URLs. Duplicate item names and Mime type mismatches were handled by Migration Accelerator’s in-built rules. Finally, our team generated custom reports to ensure the entire content portfolios of respective corporate departments, subsidiary companies and PRISM functions were migrated successfully.
Post Migration Support
Our post-migration support ensured that users can find the newly restructured and migrated content in the SharePoint platform and to help DLF with SharePoint adoption, our team provided post-migration support. As a Microsoft Gold Partner and Microsoft Preferred Partner in Content Services with extensive SharePoint, Proventeq’s adoption support ensured that DLF gained maximum value from the features offered by SharePoint.
Smooth Transition To Sharepoint
The adoption of both a pilot migration which ensured that the proposed strategy met the needs of the project and the implementation of an incremental production migration process helped DLF avoid any costly or time-consuming technical issues. It also ensured that departments across the organisation would be able to access content and information as needed both during the project and after the migration’s completion. By following this up with an extended period of adoption support, our team eased the transition to SharePoint, helped identify and remedy any user account and information management issues; thereby ensuring that all DLF’s initial goals and long-term goals when adopting SharePoint were achieved.
Flexible Content Management
With a large volume of staff spread over corporate departments and subsidiaries, combined with the need to distribute large complex content types to external stakeholders; DLF needed a Content Services platform which provided flexible distribution, management and collaboration. SharePoint Online answered all of these needs and now forms the extensible central hub for DLF’s information management infrastructure; encouraging productivity and real-time collaboration through the range of productivity tools available in Office 365.
Improved User Productivity
By empowering DLF’s users with a secure centralised search platform that allows the restriction of search to specific content types for specific users within their customised SharePoint Online instance, Proventeq have helped reduce the time spent across the organisation searching for and working with content. This measure has also helped to negate the impact of having to replicate effort in storing and managing documents and rich media across disconnected on-premise platforms, thereby allowing content to now be distributed to both internal staff and external stakeholders securely, quickly and easily.
Reduced Total Cost Of Ownership
Due to an existing investment in Microsoft’s Office 365 platform, DLF have found that by moving the content out of IBM FileNet P8 and decommissioning the IBM system there has been a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership of their ECM infrastructure. These savings have been generated by a 35% reduction in licensing costs and by negating the need for expenditure on modernizing and upgrading FileNet P8 to provide the functionality the organisation required.
Robust Information Protection
While overarching control over complex granular permissions had proved problematic in FileNet P8, adoption of Microsoft’s Azure Information Protection allows DLF to meet a key goal of achieving granular control of view, read and print permissions on externally-shared content. Migration Accelerator has given DLF the ability to apply AIP security to content; allowing the organisation to meet the security challenges of managing high volumes of content across internal and external users.
