Royal Ahrend
Migration from IBM Filenet to SharePoint Online
The Business Case for Migration
Royal Ahrend needed to move from their legacy IBM FileNet system into SharePoint Online and take advantage of the new functionality and features available, while also maintaining the business content they had on their clients, and on their current and past projects.
By working closely with the Royal Ahrend IT Support team, and using customer IDs to create individual site collections in the target SharePoint system, Proventeq were able to appropriately restructure the content which contained both documents and emails, to a more logical hierarchy in SharePoint.
This move to Microsoft 365 enabled Royal Ahrend to realise its modern digital workplace ambitions and get a secure remote working environment ready for active collaboration amongst its departments.
The Challenges of Migrating from Filenet to SharePoint
Bad User Experience
User Interfaces (UI) in the legacy ECM are unfriendly and challenging to work with, which created a bad user experience and had a negative impact on efficiency and productivity.
Complex to manage and maintain
Content was stored according to the file types available in the legacy FileNet system. The poor information architecture made it hard to manage and maintain.
Inefficient and High management Costs
The metadata in the legacy FileNet platform was either missing or incomplete and needed adding from various sources . This was time consuming and costly to manage.
Compliance and security Issues
Dossier documents were filed in common object stores in FileNet instead of customer-specific locations which created compliance and security issues.
The Results
Improved user productivity
With the extensive restructuring, rationalisation and enrichment of the various data types, Proventeq were able to align content in a clean and robust way, that both caters for historical data and empowers Royal Ahrend to take advantage of the many benefits that restructuring and re-alignment brings to their data - consolidating their digital workplace.
No BAU impact
Allowing for the migration to happen alongside existing business processes was a challenge, which was met due to data load planning and allowed the migrated and centralised data to continue working with full integration into companies’ existing ERP and CRM systems. Going live allowed daily business processes to continue.
Reduced costs
Easier but more powerful administration and management coupled with provisions for Data Loss Prevention tIn moving their data away from IBM FileNet, Royal Ahrend were able to make cost savings by decommissioning the legacy system and data held in these disparate locations. This was all achieved in a way which did not impact their day to day business processes.
