The Business Case

Your company has chosen Microsoft SharePoint as its Intranet and collaboration platform. It also has a legacy document archive with content that is critical to the company’s business processes. The legacy platform is expensive to maintain and doesn’t offer the same features users have come to expect from SharePoint. These are strong incentives for moving to a SharePoint-only solution and require the “migration” of both business processes and content from the legacy archive to SharePoint.

Requirements Analysis

In close cooperation with the customer, Data Strategies performs an analysis of the current functionality of the legacy platform and identifies additional desired features. A functional specification is produced, already taking into account how requirements can be mapped to SharePoint. Upon approval by the customer, a technical specification is generated that details the configuration of SharePoint, including descriptions of workflows, interfaces for content capture and visualization, etc. The technical specification also addresses the mapping of legacy “report types” and indexes to content types and metadata in the SharePoint environment.

Legacy Content Migration

Content migration consists of an extraction phase (from the legacy archive) and an ingestion phase (into SharePoint). Unfortunately, typical legacy archives do not facilitate the batch export of documents and associated indexes. With very few exceptions, the legacy software provider offers no APIs or utilities that “expose” the archived documents. That is why Data Strategies has been developing its DocumentGenie migration toolkit over the last 15 years, now with support for SharePoint targets. Over 70 legacy archives and storage technologies are supported, see the table below. Data Strategies’ off-line migration services are unique in that they use technologies and processes that do not impact the customer’s day-to-day operations. Using the off-line approach, data migrations and conversions are performed in the shortest time and the most cost-effective way. When available, the migration procedure operates on a disk-based copy of the legacy archive data. In case the legacy archive uses optical storage, we operate directly from backup platters/discs or from primary platters that can be temporarily ejected. Also, data can be extracted from CAS systems such as EMC Centera. A copy of the legacy database (SQL or proprietary) is used to identify all “live” documents and to extract metadata. When needed, legacy documents can undergo format conversions. As an example, COLD reports that originate from IBM iSeries archives typically need to be split into individual documents (statements, invoices) and format converted from AFP to PDF.

Quality Control & Assurance Procedures

As with all our migration and conversion processes, our SharePoint archive migration process is database driven, allowing efficient quality assurance procedures and complete process audit-trail creation. Automatic data format validation plays an important part in the overall quality control of the migration process.

SharePoint Ingestion

Once the documents and their metadata are extracted from the legacy archive, Data Strategies creates a content package ready to be imported into SharePoint using its Content Deployment APIs. This Microsoft-supported approach ensures maximum speed, compatibility. In the creation of the content package, we apply the mapping criteria you have specified, including content type mapping and folder structure creation. For maximum flexibility, Data Strategies can also provide a custom import application built on SharePoint APIs that allows import of objects not available using the standard stsadm import command.

Architecture

The migration process uses our proprietary technology that is the result of years of development in the area of legacy data archive conversion. The output is a series of files (documents) and standard SharePoint XML archive descriptors (manifest, permissions, etc.), ready to be imported into SharePoint using standard tools and APIs.

The modular Document Genie for Sharepoint Migration Platform

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The conversion platform is continuously expanded to support additional formats/systems. Support for new legacy archive formats can typically be provided within a few weeks of in-house analysis and development. We offer our customers the option of performing the service either on-site or off-site at our secure facilities in Houston, Texas or Como, Italy.

Contact Information

For additional information on our Document Migration Services, please contact:

USA
Dr. Johan de Haas
phone: 713-782-7183
e-mail: johan@go-dsi.com

Europe
Luca Grassi
phone: +39 0362 163 6092
e-mail: luca@go-dsi.com