So, we’ve been talking in the last few blogs about the motivation, challenges and realities of content migration. I think it’s time to conclude with a couple of thoughts about why you’d benefit from doing all this with a partner like SynApps.

There’s the do nothing option, of course. We discussed the option of just leaving it all in situ. However, if you leave the content where it is, then you are stuck with the old system, probably no vendor maintenance to help, and you will still have the overhead of looking after and oiling the creaky wheels of the rusty old thing in order to keep it running. That is not the way to go; you might save money, but it’s very much a false economy.

In particular, it isn’t addressing the fact that if the system goes down, there could be some very key information in there that could get irretrievably lost.

We talked about the GIGO approach – you lift all the old rubbish and transfer it in the new system.  You’ve still got a large quantity of rubbish to sift through – and if it is not classified properly, then your first page of search is going to be full of rubbish, which will not impress users. So that is not a recommended route either.

We talked about getting the business to help. In our view, there should be more of this involvement and team collaboration. In the rare instances where the business has been involved, the results have been very beneficial indeed – often, when you get the right kind of interest and buy in to getting data appropriately sifted, business users will provide a very extensive set of additional information. It’s very rewarding to work with the business like this and we would love to see more of it.

In most cases, organisations try and push the data enhancement work over to the developer team. We have been busy developing tools when that happens to help; for instance, we have a way to analyse the information from, for example, a folder structure, take information from that, then map that to the data model and the search experience. Take my word for it, the search results are much more consistent with what the end user would expect had that work not been done by you and our team!

A robust security model for your migrated content

Another aspect of working with a professional services team is security. One thing we haven’t really addressed at all is that some people think that a security model for corporate content is an old-fashioned approach. I can find this information on Google and on the Internet. Why can’t I do the same with my corporate information?’

The problem, of course, is that a) Google won’t have all the ‘corporate memory’ that is unique to your organisation and b) we have to look after the security of corporate information. Obviously, where the information is in public domain, it’s fine to use Google. But within the corporate four walls, one of the key things that we have to ensure is that we maintain security on that information. That is key, and judged to be so by regulators and auditors.

The advantage of tools such as the EMC Kazeon tool, which we discussed when we looked at de-duplication (Why Do I Want To De-Duplicate My Data When I Migrate My Content?’) for example, is that it searches all your data because it has access to it all and it creates a large index. The security challenge, then, is: how do you ensure that only the relevant people get access to it?

That index of information doesn’t typically contain any sort of security model. So you need to layer a robust security model on top, to help make sure that only the relevant people get the relevant information from your corporate data bank of content – that we will have helped you safely migrate, extend, improve and leverage.

Again, that’s what people experienced in multiple content migration integration projects know how to do.

And that is what you get when you do content migration with SynApps. Come and talk to us and find out more – and whatever happens, good luck with your content migration challenges!