How to migrate large volumes of content.

The Challenge

Flare’s client, a multinational energy company, had embarked upon a technical refresh initiative to replace all Livelink-based central data hubs and in-country document repositories with SharePoint. With over seven million documents to migrate, Flare was asked to provide the solution.

Flare’s Approach

Flare worked with the client to understand the existing information architecture, identify all existing document stores and best practices for metadata tagging. 

Flare’s application suite, , was used to create outbound adaptors to read the original sources, ensuring that no metadata was lost in the transfer.  In-bound adaptors were configured to connect to SharePoint, recognising the metadata model required for each SharePoint site.

By leveraging a central data catalog of metadata, the client was able to initiate migration of all the documents simply by modifying just one attribute in the Catalog. 

Sirus makes it possible to migrate content easily, either one document at a time, or as part of a mass migration exercise.

The solution used Flare’s Sirus platform to provide a robust mechanism for identifying items to be moved, deciding on what metadata would be migrated and automatically completing the move and delete operations.

Outcomes

• All content was successfully migrated to the appropriate repositories with appropriate metadata.
• Users suffered little to no disruption during the migration, as access to documents was granted through the metadata catalog and pointed to the relevant repository.
• No additional training of users was required as the user interface of the metadata catalog was used throughout for document access.