Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority

Migration from IBM FileNet to SharePoint

DUBAI SILICON OASIS AUTHORITY - Client Profile

Client Profile

Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority manage a 100% government-owned free zone that promotes modern technology-based industries with urban master-planned community, state-of-the-art infrastructure and in-house business services.

LOCATION
Dubai
SECTOR
Government Administration
SOURCE
IBM FileNet
DESTINATION
SharePoint
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Case Study Overview

DSOA had an ageing system which was not answering the demands of their business. The structure of the FileNet platform had proved too complex for users to easily interact with content, causing a detrimental effect on productivity and collaboration. To enable better content management, DSOA chose Microsoft's SharePoint platform to avail the classification and collaboration advantages offered.

The Complexities Of Migrating From IBM FileNet To SharePoint

Having used a legacy IBM FileNet deployment to manage over 850Gb of content since 2009, DSOA had a requirement for a modern platform to streamline various business processes and improve departmental efficiencies.

To achieve this, DSOA needed assistance in understanding the existing content landscape, implementation of an effective information management and governance strategy in SharePoint and migration of large volume of content from existing FileNet platform to align with the streamlined business processes.

However, DSOA faced a variety challenges to ensure they could take full advantage of the rich feature set offered by Microsoft SharePoint. These included:

  • Required an insight into the existing content, information architecture and ECM Features being used in IBM FileNet.
  • Investigation of the day-to-day operations involving IBM FileNet to address high-level business decisions surrounding FileNet’s content.
  • Thorough assessment of source content to identify errors, inconsistencies, and relationships surrounding content.
  • Need for an optimised information architecture which closely matched DSOA’s existing business processes.
  • Efficiently manage the migration of a large volume of content across multiple departments.
  • An audit trail of the entire migration was required to comply with government legislation.

Solving Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority’ Unique Challenges

We worked closely with the DSOA to deliver a digital transformation project that aligns with their business needs. We had migrated their content from IBM FileNet to SharePoint with the aim of optimising their content architecture.

By undertaking detailed analysis to illustrate DSOA’s existing content landscape and departmental useage, our migration experts highlighted data inconsistencies and potential issues which required attention prior to DSOA’s migration.

Some content originally stored in hierarchical IBM FileNet folders was flattened and tagged with relevant metadata for improved classification. Over 200 different document classes were consolidated into less than 20 Content Types.

We substituted all invalid characters and patterns present in the last 5 revisions of DSOA’s documents prior to migration to ensure compliance with SharePoint's naming conventions. Technically incompatible structures from FileNet were re-modelled for SharePoint.

To accelerate HR department activities and improve data protection, sensitive data spread across multiple locations was collated into an employee-centric structure.

Using Migration Accelerator's flexible scheduling and incremental migration features, DSOA’s migration was staggered over several weeks to alleviate departmental downtime.

The Results

Streamlined Content Platform

By empowering DSOA’s users with a streamlined content platform, Proventeq have helped reduce the time spent across the organization searching for and working with content. SharePoint has provided DSOA with a content services platform which enables flexible collaboration, distribution and management, thus improving user productivity across the organization.

Significant Cost Savings

DSOA have found that by moving the content out of IBM FileNet 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 reduction in licensing and support costs; and by negating the need for expenditure on modernizing the existing platform functionality to meet the organizational needs.

Minimal impact to business

Maintaining business-as-usual functions throughout the migration imperative. Proventeq seamlessly achieved this, executing and delivering their migration project with minimal impact to the business. 

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