More importantly though, SharePoint is emerging to be a propeller of a new workplace competency called Digital Dexterity: the ability and desire to maximise the use of emerging Digital Transformation technologies – by empowering all employees in an organisation – to leverage these for better business outcomes.
Due to these attractive features, many organisations which had previously been using iManage as their Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform are now seeking to take total control of their content management with SharePoint, thereby also leveraging the commercial opportunities presented by Office 365 implementation and supporting better ways of working.
Why migrate from iManage?
An overarching purpose for migrating from a legacy ECM, such as iManage, to the brave new world of a modern Content Services platform, such as Microsoft’s SharePoint is that it offers much more than traditional, legacy ECMs could ever do. It comprises the relevant features of existing ECM platforms combined with a flexible distribution platform that feeds into productivity and fuels new ways of working.
iManage is a knowledge management system used by organisations globally, especially across law firms, corporate legal departments, accounting and financial and real estate sectors. It was particularly popular with the legal industry as it revolves around Client and Matter. This industry-targeted solution makes it different to SharePoint, which is an industry-agnostic platform for collaboration and document management.
The good news is that understanding these complexities as well as the differences between these two systems can help to create a migration strategy that mitigates any possible risks that could be encountered.
What are the best practice guidelines for migrating content from iManage to Microsoft SharePoint?
Before you embark on your migration project, it is worth considering and mitigating any potential issues that could affect the content architecture and infrastructure of your new SharePoint environment to make migrating content from iManage to SharePoint as seamless as possible.
We recommend the following best practices that will ensure your migration project is a success:
Aligning with SharePoint design
iManage supports very deep-nested content hierarchies and large number of documents per container, which could easily exceed recommended limits from Microsoft. Where the limits are exceeded, the iManage content structure should be simplified or remodelled to align with the Microsoft recommendations.
iManage also allow files and folders to be filed in more than one location without duplication, causing cyclical references of folder hierarchies. On the other hand, SharePoint is a physical filing system by design, hence any virtual filing references within iManage should be converted to links within SharePoint.
Security model remapping
iManage and SharePoint have a slightly different approach to securing the content. SharePoint tries to simplify security by starting with a restrictive set of inherited permissions and only granting higher rights as needed. While every document in iManage has a ‘default security’ which is set depending on its document class. This allows a document to be made public, private to author, read-only to everyone or to inherit the parent permission.
SharePoint supports item level permissions but considers the performance impact of item level permissions and gives users the ability to structure content into various Sites and control security at a Library, Site or Site Collection level. The Permission levels available in SharePoint presents the user with a versatile way to configure complex set of permissions on items if needed. Again, therefore, having an appropriate IA in place first would help to map out the security controls required.
Adapting the information architecture
iManage stores any type of file (email, pdf files, office files etc.) as a Document in a Library composed of a content file (in native format) and document attributes (metadata). The classification or categorisation of content in iManage is managed by Document Class and Subclass. Document classes are custom-defined categories for identifying and differentiating the documents and determines what default security is set and what custom properties are associated with the document.
On the other hand, SharePoint supports a hierarchical model of classification using Content Types to classify the content and uses custom columns/metadata to manage and store the custom properties. SharePoint has several built-in Content Types, with their own set of properties necessary to interact in a collaborative environment including:
- Documents
- List items
- Announcements
- Tasks
- Surveys
SharePoint also supports 'Document Set', i.e. a collection of documents managed as a single entity.
It is recommended that the content existing within iManage is mapped to the appropriate Content Types in SharePoint, which ties in with having the right Information Architecture in place beforehand. It is worth mentioning that, where required, Custom Content Types should be defined within SharePoint to enable the correct classification and metadata mapping.
