Department
for Education

Reduced Cost, Enhanced Security and Smarter Search through a Meridio ECM modernization

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION image left shadow
UK DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION top right square
documents were migrated
saved in annual cost
files were consolidated and enriched

Client Overview

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. The department uses a customized Meridio EDRMS instance as the primary document and metadata store for their public correspondence system.

With 7 million unstructured documents stored on their legacy Meridio system, it became complex to manage, costly to maintain and did not meet the demands of modern business requirements. The DfE also had over 700,000 scanned files which required full-text conversion and classification.

The complexities in managing content on Meridio EDRMS system led to a gap in the completeness of the department's digital content portfolio. They decided to migrate their content to SharePoint to reduce the total cost of ownership of information management, optimize search and enable a seamless user experience.

LOCATION

UK

SECTOR

Government

SOURCE

Meridio

DESTINATION

SharePoint Online

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Client Challenges

DfE challenges
Complex & expensive
legacy system

Meridio was complex and costly to manage, making content difficult to navigate, govern and distribute to both internal and external stakeholders.

Lack of searchable
digital versions

Most of the DfE items stored were non-searchable due to the lack of transformed and enriched versions.
This resulted in an incomplete digital content portfolio for the department.

Risk of content loss

The department’s unsupported Enterprise Content Management system presented a risk of content loss which needed to be addressed.

Item retention labels required

The DfE’s records management team needed longer-term plans to include retention labels and dictate how long content should be deleted or archived.

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DfE Unique Challenges

Proventeq's Solution

Migrating to a modern system

Our Migration Accelerator tool was used to execute a full-fidelity migration with an item-level audit trail. This ensured that all of DfE’s content was successfully migrated to SharePoint, which is user-friendly, scalable and cost-effective.

OCR conversion of scanned files

Scanned images in multi-page PDF files, handwritten, and typed document formats were transformed by extracting text from these images and enriching the metadata. This would eventually enhance file searchability.

Enhancing security

SharePoint's advanced security features were implemented to establish robust backup and disaster recovery procedures to protect against data loss. Before migration, Meridio's content was restructured to preserve data integrity.

Implementing retention policy

Our migration experts created clear retention policies, assigned appropriate retention labels to content, and automated the deletion or archiving of expired content.

The Results

Significant reduction in costs

Transitioning to SharePoint has removed the cost of licensing DfE's Meridio platform, saving them £1 million annually. Enhanced control over provisioning in SharePoint has reduced the costs for ongoing maintenance and long-term information infrastructure ownership.

Smarter content & accelerated search

SharePoint has given the DfE the power to consolidate content in a centralized online repository, which is easy to govern, manage, and
access. Documents previously stored as non-searchable files can easily
be searched.

Improved security & compliance

By implementing retention labels in SharePoint through intelligent automation, the department's content lifecycle will be managed securely. Additionally, this will mitigate the risk of content loss and help them meet compliance requirements.

Our project was unique and complex yet the Proventeq migration team solved the problem quickly. We have validated that all the content has been migrated. Return on investment has been proved regarding our ongoing DfE savings after moving from
Echo Meridio.

Philip Humphries,

Head of Knowledge & Information

Download this case study

This combination of consolidation, OCR text conversion, and intelligent
classification helps DfE users find the content they need to accelerate collaboration and meet the challenges of departmental responsibilities and administration.

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