Department for Education

Migration from Meridio to SharePoint Online

Client Profile

The UK Department for Education (DfE) is responsible for children's services and education, including early years, schools, higher and further education policy, apprenticeships and wider skills in England.

LOCATION
UK
SECTOR
Government
SOURCE
Meridio
DESTINATION
SharePoint Online
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The excellent collaboration between Proventeq, Technology Directorate, KIM and MPCD , have meant we successfully delivered a solution that meets the needs of the DfE and will facilitate easier searching of information by colleagues
- Charlotte Saxon, IT Delivery Manager - Department for Education

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Case Study Overview

 

The UK Department for Education were utilising ECHO, a customised Meridio EDRMS instance as the primary document and metadata store for their public correspondence system, which has been in place since 2004 and stored over 7 million documents. ECHO was complex and costly to manage, and had left content difficult to navigate, govern and distribute to both internal and external stakeholders.

The DfE also had over 700,000 scanned images which required full text conversion and classification. A lack of searchable digital versions of these items had led to a gap in the completeness of the department’s available digital content portfolio.

The DfE decided to migrate its content to SharePoint Online to:

 

  • Reduce the total cost of ownership of information management
  • Achieve intelligent search for hardcopy documents and images
  • Enable a seamless experience for the department’s existing Office 365 users.

The Complexities Of Migrating From Meridio To SharePoint Online

DfE’s highly customised Meridio enterprise content management system required in-depth analysis and reverse engineering by the Proventeq team to ensure that the design of the migration encapsulated the scope of the project and fulfilled all of the organisation's specific requirements. The challenges encountered include: 

  • Complex legacy platform: DfE’s entirely bespoke, domain-specific application required reverse engineering 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.
  • Target system thresholds: A new structure needed to be derived from the source content metadata to comply with SharePoint Online’s technical thresholds.
  • 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.

Our Five Stage Migration Solution