ECM Content Migration in Zero Easy Steps

ECM Content Migration is a complex, serious subject concerning your organizations most valuable, vital, and critical data, making it a real issue with real consequences if done carelessly.

The current advancement of technology systems and applications require that businesses stay agile and continually modernize. Documents and content must be migrated from legacy applications and systems or across ECM platforms. A poorly handled migration will frustrate and confuse users, take valuable resources from other priorities, and eliminate any value the transition of systems might have had. In worst case scenarios data corruption, document loss or destruction, and loss of productivity can result in abandonment of the project with heavy financial and time costs. This is why we say there are no shortcuts or easy steps, however there are a series of eight critical actions that if performed properly significantly reduces all of these risks.

The very first critical action to take is conducting a migration assessment to make absolutely certain the company should migrate. The company must have a very clear reason for why the migration is needed. A diverse cross functional team should conduct extensive cost benefit analysis, talk with all the departments involved, look at business needs alignment with user needs, and, if nothing else, a deep understanding of how the current ECM platform is being used, or possibly misused, across the entire enterprise.

Once it has been determined that the organization should perform an ECM migration, and the WHY is clearly defined, the next action is the requirements gathering process. Review the internal usage of the current ECM; types of documents, indexes, metadata, and document relationships must all be made clear. There should be a lot of time spent highlighting your businesses integration capabilities with a deep analysis and clarification of all document structures, channels, applications, and systems in use.

After requirements have been established in detail, even more time needs to be spent on extensive detailed planning and in-depth implementation considerations. The aesthetic and technical preferences should be determined and a vision of the deliverable solution should begin to form. The planning stage should always respect the design requirements for successful migration; from prioritizing by use value, planning for transfer capacity, scheduling for operational continuity, to settings for backup and replication. Plan, plan, plan, evaluate the plan, and then plan some more.

Best practices for ECM content migration involve advice from experienced migration experts so the target environment and user experience have the highest chances of being realized. These experts should evaluate your plan and make sure unstructured information is consolidated from siloed systems, shard drives, and email storage. They should also create an implementation plan with user adoption evaluation of all possible migration scenarios. The scenarios must be comprehensive with considerations for alternative silos, file sharing, outside software uses, and other ECM system uses.

After the reason, the vision, and the plan has been laid out for the new ECM system, it must be prepared for migration by setting up folder structures, document templates, and process workflows. There should be structures for auditing and indexing and final verifications. The appropriate security settings should also be set up at this time. The planning is deciding what needs to be done, the creation of structures is deciding how it will get done. As much time as was spent on planning should also be spent on the creation of structures and workflows. Your company is almost ready for migration!

Depending on the design type of migration the next steps of your specific implementation will vary. In general, the created path structures for the content utilizes tools to help process files and apply the correct metadata during transfer. These tools also allow for batch processing of documents to be routed and stored at an intermediary database location in the cloud or locally. Then they are reviewed for broken links in the documents or content resources. Finally, according to the menu structure, the connections between document paths allow extraction of resources and permits the uploading of the documents to the new ECM using either an API or web interface.

Don’t get too excited once everything has been migrated, because you are not done. Before the system goes live make sure to test everything, and then test it again. The testing should include demonstration of optimal system setup by a select group of end-users. These people should have been pre-chosen in the planning and creation stages to be best equipped for training their teams on the new system once live. Proper user training is key to ensuring users are not frustrated and will adopt the new system with as few growing pains as possible.  As a group these select end-users should also be considered a systems performance focus team whose suggestions for modifications can be made before the ECM is whole enterprise active. One of the most often cited challenges to implementing a new ECM is user adoption, and this is where you find out how well it was planned.

This should actually be done before you plan. If you know you should migrate and you know your requirements then you should have help from the very beginning. There are zero easy steps to ECM content migration, but experience will make the many complex actions a little less risky. Skytizens has a long history of successful migrations, from bigger corporations to smaller businesses, transferring content, data, and stored records from a multitude of systems to the Alfresco Digital Business Platform. A well-planned and executed migration has the power to improve the operating environment of an entire organization. Skytizens can effectively move your documents, data, and business-critical information without interrupting daily functions.

Meet the demands of customers and system users, and keep pace with industry competition by re-evaluating and rethinking your ECM strategies. Migration strategies currently employed include moving databases between platforms, moving content across databases, simple migration from hard drive to application, and content migration across applications within a platform. Regardless of best approach determination, your content will benefit most from being migrated to a modern, flexible, and open system. Learn more about ECM Content Migration and all the other features available from Skytizens that is good for business;