
J. Sagar Associates (JSA)
Migration from iManage Worksite to SharePoint
Client profile
JSA is recognised as a leading national law firm providing legal services to top Indian corporates, Fortune 500 companies, multinational banks and financial institutions, governmental and statutory authorities and multilateral and bilateral institutions.
Case study overview
With over 1 million content items spread across a complex iManage Worksite deployment, combined with a high volume of un-filed documents on user’s machines due to the constraints of device-based iManage licensing; JSA required a content services platform which would effectively manage their daily needs while reducing costs and provisioning licensing across user devices.
To achieve this, JSA nominated to migrate from Worksite to SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams, this would provide the ease of management, content structure and total cost of ownership reductions required by the client.
However, due to the nature of their business, a move from Worksite to SharePoint Online & Microsoft Teams would require a degree of customisation to suit their information architecture needs.
JSA chose Proventeq to provide the expertise needed to complete the project successfully. The project was handled by Proventeq’s Migration Accelerator software, supported by a team of SharePoint migration experts.
The complexities of migrating from iManage Worksite to SharePoint
- iManage license was per device, so it was costly to provide multi-device licenses to partners, secretaries and attorneys. This compounded the total cost of ownership.
- Complex information architecture was required by JSA. This would allow effective organisation of client matters, ;personal workspaces and corporate functions.
- Navigation, Site Columns (Metadata), Site Content Types (Templates), Permissions need to be deployed once to all 25,000+ workspaces related site collections.
- Custom security requirements were needed to restrict content deletion along with applying unique security to JSA’s 25,000+ workspaces-related site collections.
- Automation required to support continuous governance for matters sites based on ERP system output. This would include applying template, unique properties and security to these matter sites.
Solving JSA's unique challenges
To meet the complex challenges of JSA’s SharePoint Online and Teams adoption project, Proventeq proposed and carried out a strategic six-step migration solution utilising the advanced features of the Migration Accelerator product.
Drill-down discovery reports and pre-migration checks identified potential issues and helped decide on an efficient migration strategy. Empty and duplicate workspaces reports helped prioritize migration of active Matters.
Proventeq designed Matter-centric site collections, personal and support functions site collections. This flat architecture will allow easier aggregation and search. Hub sites allow JSA to logically group matter site collections.
Custom content classification and target structure mapping features addressed the requirement to classify the content accurately and migrate related documents together into site collections and document libraries in SharePoint Online
Proventeq carried out a pilot migration by mapping content from Worksite to demonstrate how the production migration would work. This gave JSA Law an opportunity to test existing data in a production-like SharePoint Online environment.
Proventeq utilised Migration Accelerator’s incremental migration features to successfully stage the production migration as per active Matters, support functions and personal workspaces.
The Results

Interconnected user experiences
Proventeq empowered JSA’s team with a secure centralised platform. This allows JSA’s team to manage Team chats, documents, notes and calendar per Matter or client by using SharePoint Online’s simple and modern experience. Users can access or upload contents to Matter, personal or OneDrive site collections from anywhere with any device. This has led to greater productivity for the organisation. This has also helped to negate the impact of having to replicate effort in storing and managing documents and emails across disconnected on-premise platforms; allowing content to now be distributed to both internal staff and external stakeholders quickly and easily.

Improved business processes
Proventeq has automated creation of Matters and other features in SharePoint Online by using simple tool-based interface. JSA is now considering use of Proventeq’s document classification templates for all deployed Office Apps by implementing Azure Information Protection (AIP). JSA have also now been given the opportunity to build automated work-flows with SharePoint Online framework and extensions to automate and support JSA business processes.

Reduced total cost of ECM ownership
As JSA are already deploying a Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise suite subscription, migrating content from iManage to SharePoint Online & Teams significantly reduces the cost of multi-device licensing, enabling user’s with access to content from any device type. Furthermore, utilising SharePoint Online & Teams as a component of their Office 365 deployment means that JSA will also negate the infrastructure cost of hosting and managing iManage servers once the Worksite deployment is fully decommissioned.