Hospitality Company Decommissions Legacy System to Reduce Costs and Improve User Experience
Stonebridge Companies is one of the nation’s leading ownership, management, and hospitality development companies; it consists of 63 hotels with 10,000+ rooms across the United States. To save money and improve their staff’s user experience, the company needed to combine their ECM platforms into one system and move their content to the cloud.
To achieve their goal, they selected Gimmal as their trusted advisor to migrate their content from OpenText Content Server to SharePoint. Utilizing the tools available within Gimmal Migrate, along with the experienced professionals at Gimmal, Stonebridge successfully migrated their documents, including all versions, metadata, folder structures, legacy links, and permissions, to SharePoint.
Business Needs
Headquartered in Denver Colorado, Stonebridge hotel management spans from coast to coast. With 63 different locations, the company relies heavily on the ability to collaborate across a wide geographical area in the United States. In the beginning, Microsoft services such as Office and Skype were used for accessing documents and communicating across the various properties that Stonebridge held. However, the central repository for all company files was located on premises at the headquarters in Denver using OpenText Content Server. Over time, the increasing costs and complexity of maintaining OpenText Content Server became a challenge and there was a strong desire to move to the cloud to reduce costs.
After an initial investigation, it became clear that the company would realize substantial savings by decommissioning Content Server and moving their content to SharePoint. The transition would be easy because many of the employees already had experience with Microsoft Office and Skype. This knowledge could be easily transferred to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.
The challenging part would be extracting more than 10 years of information including critical data from Content Server. The system contained important documents including metadata and permissions that needed to be preserved. Additionally, the legacy links contained within those documents would need to be maintained and working after the move to SharePoint. It was important that whoever completed the migration would have to have expert knowledge of both Content Server and SharePoint to ensure the smooth and efficient transfer of data.
Solution
Stonebridge needed a trusted advisor who had extensive experience in migrating information from OpenText Content Server to SharePoint. Gimmal had the experience, knowledge, and expertise in Content Server to SharePoint migrations. Along with their proven migration processes and the easy-to-use Gimmal Migrate, it became clear that Gimmal would be Stonebridge’s best option to make their migration to SharePoint as smooth as possible.
Once an agreement was put in place, the Gimmal Migrate Services Team quickly conducted a fit gap analysis between Content Server and SharePoint. It was obvious SharePoint would meet their requirements for storing, sharing, and accessing files.
Additionally, the team realized that Microsoft Teams would be a great fit for collaborating across all of Stonebridge’s properties. The biggest hurdle was extracting the content and metadata from Content Server to SharePoint with full fidelity. During the fit gap analysis, Gimmal identified how all of Stonebridge’s content was structured in Content Server. The Gimmal Team then explained how all the company’s information could be easily migrated to SharePoint using Site Collections and Document Libraries. All metadata that was stored in Content Server could easily be represented in SharePoint using content types and columns. The permissions applied in Content Server could also be preserved and migrated to SharePoint.
Once Stonebridge gave the go ahead, the Gimmal Team got to work using Gimmal Migrate to start planning and implementing migration project. They used the Gimmal Content Server Discovery and Analytics Tool to examine Stonebridge’s OpenText environment. Reports were produced by the Gimmal tools on the findings which included document counts, sizing, and the types of items stored within the system.
The Gimmal Team identified any potential hiccups such as long paths; this allowed them to plan and implement work arounds. With the reports, they developed a schedule on which areas should be migrated and when. The Gimmal Team also assisted with configuring Stonebridge’s SharePoint
environment, setting up the site collections and creating the content types and columns following best practices. Moving the content to SharePoint was made easy using the Gimmal Migrate API Tool (MAPIT). MAPIT can take the content and map all the required metadata from Content Server to associated columns and content types in SharePoint. MAPIT’s Restructuring feature helped to resolve any long paths.
Once the team addressed all potential issues, the content was migrated via Azure to SharePoint as quickly as possible. The taxonomy was rehydrated in SharePoint and the everything was structured as it was in Content Server. Gimmal Migrate created migration and validation logs, where were all uploaded to the Stonebridge’s SharePoint in their own site collection. The logs serve as proof that the documents were migrated to SharePoint.
Results
With the assistance of Gimmal, Stonebridge was able to migrate all content from Content Server to SharePoint on time and on budget. Stonebridge users found that the newly created document libraries and site collections easy to use. The folder structures from Content Server were replicated and their information was easy to find.
Document browsing and sharing was made easier for the Stonebridge staff. They could access their content from anywhere including on mobile devices. The integration with other Microsoft 365 products improved productivity and the client was delighted to use Teams for their collaboration requirements and meetings.
Stonebridge and Gimmal received positive feedback from end users. They appreciated the ease of having only one login account for all the systems used including option for Multi Factor Authentication (MFA). Overall team communication and collaboration was drastically improved. In the end, Stonebridge achieved cost savings by reducing licensing and support costs through the decommissioning OpenText Content Server, and at the same time, improved the work experience for their staff.
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