New Forest District Council

Meridio ECM Modernization

Client Profile

Data migration can optimize decades of user managed content, which can often have inaccurate, inconsistent or minimal metadata applied. Proventeq’s migration experts worked closely with the New Forest District Council’s team, providing technical consultancy to help the team to understand the migration tool and to accelerate migration and complete the project ahead of the target date.

In February 2020, just before the first lockdown from Covid-19, New Forest District Council completed the Microsoft 365 roll-out to all staff (about 700 licenses). Following this, they embarked on the move away from Meridio (a legacy EDRMS) to Sharepoint Online at the end of 2020.

Proventeq was chosen to perform the analysis and discovery, with migration to take place within a 25 week time frame before Meridio could be decommissioned.

The council’s Migration Project Team recognized that the old Meridio structure might not reflect the reality of the council today, and with our help were able to map the old folder structure into the new business reality.

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Location

UK

Sector

Public Sector, Government

Source

Meridio

Destination

SharePoint Online

The Client's Unique Challenges

Structures of varying complexity

The council team identified 25 distinct business areas within Meridio, each with folder structures of varying complexity. Classification and separation of data was required to meet the demands of accessibility and navigation within the new SharePoint architecture.

Strict timeframe for the migration

To minimize the impact to the busy council offices, the migration had to take place in stages over the 25 week project period. Each Friday the relevant department would be told to`freeze’ Meridio, and migration would recommence the following Monday again to SharePoint Online.

Content sprawl

With so much data and several departments in the council working in their own respective ways, there was a large amount of redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data to assess.

Document control issues

The old Meridio structure created opportunities for documents to be filed in multiple locations which led to several copies of the same documents scattered across the content landscape.

Proventeq's Best practice strategy

Proventeq's solution accelerated the migration and completed the project ahead of the target date.

Discovery & analysis

Proventeq’s M365 and Azure Cloud experts worked closely with the client’s business and technology teams to design and implement a solution. This enabled a smooth transition for the customer to their existing M365 and Azure Cloud platforms for their DocumentCentric Customer Communication Process Automation requirements.

Restructuring of data

Proventeq’s Content Analyzer delivered powerful Power BI reports to help the council team to discover data within the Meridio system. Proventeq then helped the council to restructure their data before migration, to enhance the employee experience and suit each department’s requirements.

Classification of data

Proventeq identified that up to 30% of data was redundant and did not need to be migrated from Meridio. This gave the council an opportunity to migrate only the data they needed into the most up to date business practice areas in the target system.

Security & compliance

Proventeq’s technical architects provided a unique level of security throughout the migration. Through integrating metadata of the source and the destination, we were able to migrate content with the same security permissions.

The Results

New cloud-based libraries

With all documents associated with cases in Salesforce kept in SharePoint, users are now able to upload documents via a custom component in a Salesforce record which then auto-generates a SharePoint link. This allows users to save documents in SharePoint, allowing non-Salesforce users to access documents related to the Salesforce record without requiring purchasing additional Salesforce licenses.

Cost savings by decommissioning Meridio

With the data now residing in SharePoint Online, New Forest District Council is able to achieve significant cost savings through the removal of the additional Meridio licenses.

Enhanced productivity

The consolidation and new file structure of the new environment has helped the council employees to find the data they need to meet the challenges and responsibilities of departmental collaboration.

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Proventeq’s migration experts worked closely with the New Forest District Council’s team, providing technical consultancy to help the team to understand the migration tool and hence meet their business goals.

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