opentext edocs to sharepoint ebook

Full fidelity

migration from

OpenText eDOCS

to SharePoint

Migration best practice to optimise business

productivity and growth

A truly successful migration must provide tangible business benefits throughout all stages of your content migration.

However, the challenges of content migration to a new platform can be complex, costly and cause detrimental business downtime. Migrating your content to a more suitable content platform requires careful preparation.

This eBook will navigate you through the complexities involved in OpenText eDOCS to SharePoint migration and will equip you with the knowledge to execute a smooth migration. We will help you appreciate the differences between eDOCS and SharePoint and key considerations for your migration project. We shall conclude our paper with a discussion on the business benefits and the opportunities that you may expect from your full fidelity migration project.

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Introduction

The new business landscapeOrganisations and their Internet of Things are generating a huge amount of data in this era of digital disruption. The role of content is gaining importance in every sphere of the business ecosystem. Content is perceived as a business enabler. But the legacy ways of managing this content are ineffective as content stored in silos becomes a roadblock to business initiatives that call for the agility of execution. A dysfunctional legacy content management system (ECM) erodes your business operations over time, leaving you no choice but to replace it before it is too late.

Modern business demands a fundamental shift in the way work gets done. Post-Covid, organisations are embracing digital workplace technology to optimise productivity, collaboration, and the employee experience. Secure remote working requirements are emerging, new definitions of digital workplaces are evolving as people are working remotely and doing more digital work. For a modern business, migration is not a “lift and shift” project, but a strategic exercise to gain the maximum value from your information by ensuring its new home is truly optimised for productivity, collaborative working and business growth. Implementing a cloud-based Content Services Platform would optimise how your business utilises its information.

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Why migrate from OpenText eDOCS

If you still need more reasons to move to SharePoint,please continue reading.

OpenText™ eDOCS is a Document Management System (DMS) for legal, public sector, professional service organisations and corporate law departments. Microsoft SharePoint, however, is a Content Services Platform (CSP) that is designed to boost collaborative working and productivity in addition to having intelligent document management capabilities.

SharePoint is becoming a mature modern content services platform recognised as a leader in Garter Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant Report for 2020. SharePoint offers an industry-agnostic platform for collaboration and document management. Due to this, many organisations are evaluating SharePoint, thereby leveraging the commercial opportunities presented by Office 365 implementation and supporting better ways of working.

A key driver of migrating from OpenText eDOCS to the brave new world of Microsoft’s SharePoint is that it offers much more than the traditional legacy ECMs could ever do. SharePoint has the relevant features of existing legacy ECM platforms combined with a flexible distribution platform that feeds into productivity and fuels new ways of working.

Key migration challenges

Content migration from a dysfunctional legacy ECM to a suitable platform is a complex exercise. Thoughtful planning, robust migration strategy, an understanding of migration risk profile and knowledge of differences between the two systems are required to counter any possible risks. Some of the key challenges and respective mitigation techniques that you need to take into account are:

6. Expensive to build bespoke content extractors

Engage migrationexperts with ready todeploy legacyconnectors

2. Underlying document architecture differences

eDOCS supports virtual hierarchy of collection of highly related information, whereas SharePoint follow strict hierarchy of documents.

3. Complex and heavily customised ECM environment

Need a specialist eDOCS resource who can review the content model and best way to work against the target platform a combination of API or data export

4. Restructuring of information architecture

Use automated solutionfor building complexmapping to restructurelegacy ECM to a newenvironment

5. Business continuity issues of legacy system

Optimise the migration processes to ensure less impact to the existing business operations by not putting migration load to the eDOCS platform during office hours.

Migration challenges

1. Limited understanding of legacy content usage and patterns

To gain content insight with access to the right content analysis software


https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/gartner-content-services-platform-mq-2020/).


Turning the content migration challenge into an opportunity

While the differences between OpenText eDOCS and SharePoint can sometimes be perceived to present complex challenges, by approaching your content migration in a planned, forward-thinking and positive manner, the complexities can be turned into tangible opportunities to take greater control of your content, and ensure that your SharePoint platform is optimised to deliver the best user experience possible, from the outset. If well-planned and executed correctly, a content migration can optimise decades of user managed content, which can often have inaccurate, inconsistent or minimal metadata applied.

With the right approach, the right partner and the right tools, that historical content can be curated to ensure significant increases in user experience, enabled by better search, improved access to content, plus the other benefits that your organisation is seeking through the adoption of SharePoint.

It is to be expected that modern ECM platforms like SharePoint offer more improved user experience and seamless integration with “The New Work Nucleus” applications. Equally, there will always be situations where OpenText eDOCS has a feature set that SharePoint does not support. Many of these differences can be managed through a user and content migration that encompasses the design of pragmatic and transformational changes to the ways in which users interact with enterprise content.

As technology platforms offer more, and users’ expectations grow, so does the requirement to ensure that information is concurrently managed, secure and accessible. As you plan your journey towards the adoption of SharePoint, working with the right partner, selecting the right tools and taking a best-practice approach to content migration can mitigate risk, reduce complexity and ensure a great start for your users and the new platform.



Pool Reinsurance (PoolRe), is a mutual insurer set up by the British government with leading insurers to provide terrorism cover. Its members

comprise the vast majority of insurers and Lloyd’s Syndicates which offer commercial property insurance

in the UK.

Migrate quarter of a million documents from OpenText eDOCS to the new intranet site built on SharePoint.

Client ambition

• Unclassified content - Almost half the content was notclassified with the required metadata

• Documents were not filed in OpenText eDOCS, but thenew IA in SharePoint required mapping documents basedon its metadata into over a hundred folders in variouslibraries spread across different Site Collections

• Source systems contained content with invalid data notsupported in SharePoint

• Content reorganisation warranted restructuring ofcontent hierarchy and moving documents into public andprivate locations

• The existing metadata had to be enhanced to fit into thenew metadata model

• Business downtime during migration had to be minimisedfor critical departments

Challenges

Proventeq Content Analyser and Migration Accelerator were the key technology solutions used to migrate content into SharePoint thus providing an automated solution and reducing the overall cost of migration.

Migration success

A universal platformMigrating from five different source systems can pose different challenges. Our expert team merged millions of assets into one, easy-to-use site which increased the accessibility of relevant documents for their employees.

Mitigated downtimeConsolidated content from multiple source platforms into Microsoft SharePoint with minimal business downtime with managed migration.

Safe contentEach piece of content was reassigned the same level of security as within the origin system, to ensure the asset library remained protected.

The Results

Proventeq knew their stuff and

nothing was too much to ask.

Adam DaltonIT Manager, PoolRe

Read the full case study here

”“


Intelligent Migration Success StoryOpenText eDOCS to SharePoint

Location: UK | Industry: Insurance

https://www.proventeq.com/products/content-analyser

https://www.proventeq.com/products/migration-accelerator

https://www.proventeq.com/client/lifearc-uk

https://www.proventeq.com/client/pool-reinsurance-uk


SharePoint as an ECM platform

SharePoint is known for its ability to useemerging technology for better businessoutcomes through employee empowerment(Digital dexterity capability). The platform hasgrown in both scope and capability and hasemerged as a serious contender in the ContentServices space.

Business benefits of SharePoint platform

Realise your Digital Dexterity goals

SharePoint, as an integral part of Office 365, isused by organisations globally for DigitalTransformation and their users now have attheir disposal a modern, smart suite ofcollaborative and productivity tools such asTeams, OneDrive for Business, Yammer, PowerBI, Flow and Stream. These “The New WorkNucleus” applications are inherently mobile andcollaborative, analytical and integrated,increasingly infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI)services, thereby enhancing contentclassification, enrichment and searchability.

The rise and rise of SharePoint as an ECM platform

SharePoint has come a long way. From a simpleserver management tool during 2001 to beingfeatured as a leader in 2020 Gartner MagicQuadrant for Content Services Platforms,SharePoint’s market journey has beenphenomenal. It reinvented itself keeping pacewith the changing market preferences.

Today it has become a platformof choice for organisationslooking for ease of use, straightforward licensing, securitycapabilities and nativeintegration with the Office 365productivity and collaborationtools.

With this, SharePoint can enable yourorganisation to improve its ways of working. Inthis way, your organisation will truly be able torealise its Digital Dexterity goals – i.e. toempower employees with digital skills toembrace these new ways of working - whenmigrating from OpenText eDOCS to SharePoint.

Microsoft Teams

Yammer

OneDrive

Power BI

Microsoft Flow

MicrosoftStream

The New Work Nucleus




End the disconnect between “working on” and “working with” content

By storing and managing content within SharePoint, you enable a seamless user experience with Office 365’s array of productivity tools, such as Teams, Yammer, Flow and Stream.

By arming your staff with the ability to easily access content and interact with it through a familiar interface, you answer one of the biggest challenges faced by many on-premise and proprietary content management platforms: the disconnection between “working on” and “working with” content.

Users will no longer have to jump between systems to store or retrieve content, which means that goals such as simplified version control, accelerated content distribution and real-time collaboration are easily within reach.

Robust security, compliance and eDiscovery

eDOCS records management capabilities can be replaced by using Office 365 E5 licenses, including AI-led content classification to apply security policies. Microsoft 365 E5 offers advanced compliance capabilities through continuous risk assessment and risk identification. Automatically protecting and governing sensitive data throughout its lifecycle and efficiently responding to legal, business and regulatory requests.

Process automation and intelligent content classification

Customers using eDOCS get an opportunity to truly transform their workflow capabilities using Microsoft Power Platform tooling specifically Power Automate for complex workflows, Power Apps for low-code application development, and Power Portal for external customer portal use cases.

SharePoint Syntex can enable AI-based document classification capabilities or processing complex OCR or form processing requirements.


Document management capability

Storage hierarchy

OpenText organises documents into physical collections, called Libraries which could contain a hierarchy of folders. Some organisations use folders to organise the documents (filed content), while other use only metadata (without any folders) to organise and search content (unfiled content). OpenText allows the content to exist in the system without being filed in any location, i.e., is not part of any hierarchy, and is only available using search or link.

SharePoint organizes its content in Site Collections, which are top-level containers based on common function or other groupings. Site Collections supports several Sites and Sub Sites underneath it, each of which could contain several lists and libraries to store different types of content including documents, tasks, events, surveys etc. Further hierarchy can be managed using folders.

Storage locationFiles are stored in the folder. When a document is unfiled it will exist within the Library.

Files are stored in libraries or folders within libraries, which are located in a Site Collection, Site or a Sub Site.

FilingDocuments can be filed in a folder or left unfiled in a system. Documents can also be filed in more than 1 folder.

Documents must be filed only in a single library or folder.

Version controlSupports major and minor versioning. Uses alphanumeric versioning

Supports major and minor versioning. Uses numeric versioning

File locking (check-out/check-in)

Supports checking out documents before editing.

Document Libraries can be configured to force a check-out prior to document modification. Default behaviour for SharePoint online is to allow collaborative editing of documents and manage the versions automatically.

Classification Documents can be classified using ‘Profiles’ Supports custom ‘content types’ to classify documents

Metadata/taxonomy Supports custom attributes for profiles.Supports custom columns for content types. There is additional support for Managed Metadata / taxonomy.

Audit trail Activities on documents can be audited. Activities on documents can be audited.

OpenText eDOCS vs Microsoft SharePoint



Document management capability

Security & access controlUser and groups can be granted permission to a folder or document. Permission can be set on an individual version of the document.

Users and groups can be granted permission to Site collections, Sites, Libraries, Folders or Documents. Permission can be set on the entire document, where all versions of the document will have the same security.

SearchSupports searching for documents in the library based on profile attributes.

Supports content search across sites based on content types, metadata and free text.

Document workflowDocuments in the library can be managed using custom workflows.

Documents in the library can be managed using custom workflows.

Annotations Third-party products add-ons required for annotations. Third-party products add-ons required for annotations.

Attachments Documents can have multiple attachments.Documents stored in the document library cannot have attachments, only list items in Lists support attachments.

Relations Supports relating documents. Need customisation to relate documents.

Compound documents

Documents can have a compound document relationship

(parent and child document relationship) with other

documents in the object store.

Although an out of the box feature for compound documents is not available, a solution using inbuilt columns can be configured during migration to recreate the feature of the compound document.

Multi content documentsSupports a document that consists of a primary document

with multiple secondary documents.

The Document Set feature supports multiple documents as single

entity where the entity as a whole can be versioned, or its

individual documents can be versioned.

Personal workspaceSupports storing bookmarks to various folders and documents

in the library.

Personal documents can be stored in OneDrive. Need third-party add-in to support other features.

OpenText eDOCS vs Microsoft SharePoint continued…



Structuring your migration project

Pre-migration

• Gain actionable insights: Identify project scope,critical content and scale your new contentarchitecture accurately with advanced discovery,analysis and reporting functions.

• Negate risks: Stay on schedule and withinbudget with intelligent pre-migration checks topre-emptively identify potential risks to yourproject

Post-migration

You have the opportunity post-migration tooptimise the IA and content searchability to turn your content into your most powerful business asset. This is also the time to enforce the right content governance and retention policies. If you need to keep the existing system live for a certain duration after the migration process is complete, you should continue to sync the content into SharePoint Online, to ensure that your users have a smooth transition. You may also want to consolidate content from any other systems into SharePoint Online.

• Integrate your content portfolio: Tokeep an existing system live aftermigration. Consolidate content frommultiple source systems andrepositories easily and quickly.

• Improved user productivity: Exploit thepotential of your content throughoptimised IA and searchability and turnyour information into your mostpowerful business asset.

After an elaborate discussion on complexities and best practices in earlier sections, now it is a time to practice what we learnt. The next logical step is to ensure that your migration project has the right structure and solution/delivery accelerators so that complexities can be turned into tangible commercial opportunities. Utilising an industry-standard tool from a leading migration vendor such as, Migration Accelerator from Proventeq, will maximise the potential of your content and information management infrastructure throughout each stage of your migration project. It is a must-have migration tool for high-volume, complex content migration projects where integrity, continuity and enrichment are a priority.

A typical migration project comprises of three steps as follows:


During migration

This is when you are not only migrating your businesscontent over from OpenText eDOCS to SharePoint, but also enriching and restructuring it for users to be able to get the most out of it. Intelligent content classification, metadata extraction, Information Architecture (IA) remapping and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can all help achieve this.

• Enrich & restructure your content: Give your content the context you need with enrichment via classification, IA remapping, metadata & taxonomy.

• Maintain business continuity: Minimise departmental downtime. Thanks to high-speed, incremental migration and reusable scheduled tasks.

• Transform how you work with content: Enable your workforce to work with all content types, even handwritten documents, thanks to advanced OCR and format conversion.

• Intelligently classify your documents: Use machine learning to intelligently classify the ever-increasing volume of unstructured information created by your business every day.

• Seamlessly enforce compliance: Migration Accelerator’s customisable rules give you the power to ensure compliance with your internal and industry's standards

• Achieve high performance & scalability: Accelerate your move to a better business future by migrating millions of items a day using our scalable, high-throughput engine.

https://www.proventeq.com/products/migration-accelerator


The Right SharePoint Migration Tool

The right migration tool should support themigration strategy that you have put in place,fulfilling both business and technical requirements.Selecting the right migration tool should remove thechallenges that can often be encountered whenmigrating from OpenText eDOCS to like SharePointOnline. It should make migration an opportunity fororganisations to transition to Intelligent Workplacesbuilt upon SharePoint and Office 365.

Provide detailed insight intothe source content

landscape, to help with defining the scope

of migration and the design of target Information

Architecture.Feature inbuilt pre-migrationchecks to highlight anypotential issues that couldaffect the migration processbefore it begins.

Intelligently classify and restructuresource data – catering for content that has been filed incorrectly, filtering obsolete content, cleansing and enriching metadata as part of the migration to make the content easier to find and provide the ability to retain or remap the security model.

Automate the migrationprocess and supportincremental migration tominimise business downtime;thereby allowing you to breaka large migration intomanageable tasks (e.g. perdepartment), so that themigration can be delivered asper business priorities.

Provide high throughput andhandling SharePoint

throttling gracefully, when migrating large content

volumes.

Perform automated linkresolution as part of themigration to significantly

reduce the manual effort infixing broken links

postmigration

Perform transformation, (e.g.OCR conversion), on old

scanned documents to makeyour content easier to search

in SharePoint.

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About Proventeq

Proventeq helps organisations transition to Intelligent Workplaces built in SharePoint, Teams & Azure. We provide augmented content analytics, intelligent classification and metadata extraction, automated migration, information protection and governance solutions; utilizing AI/Deep Learning. Proventeq specialises in migration from non-Microsoft to M365. We are a Microsoft Gold Partner, a Microsoft Preferred Partner in Microsoft Project Cortex Launch Partners.

If you have any questions on this eBook or any aspect of deploying and migrating to a new ECM platform, please contact us at [email protected].

www.proventeq.com

