Energie Beheer Nederland (EBN) Achieves Seamless Migration to Microsoft 365 for Substantial Cost Savings
As a government organization, EBN is continuously focused on strategic and cost-effective solutions for business processes. With an initial analysis of current systems used, it was realized that decommissioning the current document management system, OpenText Content Server, and moving content to Microsoft 365, could result in significant cost-savings for the organization.
With the use of the Gimmal Migrate, EBN was able to migrate 4 terabytes of information within a short timeframe. Additionally, all of the content involved was successfully migrated to Microsoft 365 with all appropriate metadata applied. The organization was able to save money in licensing, infrastructure, and support costs as a result.
Business Needs
As EBN continued to use Microsoft for various business purposes, the organization realized that its current OpenText Content Server environment had duplicate functionality as their Microsoft 365 platform. Migrating to Microsoft 365 was the most strategic decision to cut costs and utilize a cloud platform for enterprise content management needs.
As the EBN approached the next round of licensing and support costs for OpenText Content Server, the organization needed to find a solution to migrate all content within this short timeframe. Since the amount of content involved in the migration was so large, this time constraint presented challenges for the organization when considering this strategy. EBN would need to figure out a way to migrate four terabytes of content from OpenText Content Server within a short, two-month timeframe. The content included documents, different versions, and all associated metadata. The folder structures needed to be preserved exactly as they were in Content Server. Additionally, important information was stored in personal workspaces which was not easily accessible.
To complicate things further, EBN did not have resources available to perform the migration and they approached their migration partner Portiva, a Microsoft 365 service provider in The Netherlands. It would need to leverage a managed services provider to perform this task. This team would need a tool that was easy-to-setup and use since they had only a short window to complete the work.
It was clear that in order to meet the tight deadline, EBN required a solution that would move content quickly and accurately to SharePoint Online. The solution would need to be robust in capabilities, yet simple to use, so a third-party team could quickly learn how to implement the tools needed to complete a successful migration. The third party would also require quick access to the vendor’s support team to resolve any issues that may arise to avoid any costly delays.
Solution
Portiva introduced Gimmal to EBN for help because of its extensive experience and expertise in Content Server to SharePoint migrations. With a proven migration process and easy-to-use solution, it became clear that Gimmal would be EBN’s best option to make the migration to SharePoint as smooth as possible.
After a successful proof of concept, supported by Portiva, was completed against EBN’s Content Server environment, the Portiva team responsible for the project engaged Gimmal’s support team for a quick overview of the migration software. After a short training period and some guidance on best practices for migration success, the team was ready to start running migrations for EBN.
Gimmal’s Content Server Discovery and Analytics Tool was used to generate reports on the type of content within OpenText. The reports contained document counts, sizing, and the type of permissions applied within the Content Server environment. This information was used to create a plan for migrating the content and identifying any content that may require permissions to be locked down in Microsoft 365.
The content was quickly and easily moved to Microsoft 365 using the Gimmal Migrate API Tool (MAPIT). MAPIT was able to look at the content and map all required metadata from Content Server to associated columns and content types in SharePoint. MAPIT’s restructuring feature helped to resolve paths that may be too long for migration. Once the team addressed all potential risks, the content was migrated via Azure to SharePoint as quickly as possible. The taxonomy was rehydrated in SharePoint and all migrated content was structured as it was in Content Server.
Gimmal Migrate was also able to create migration and validation logs to serve as proof that the documents were migrated to SharePoint.
During the project, Gimmal worked closely with the third-party implementation team of Portiva to address any questions and provide support regarding how to use the migration tools. Despite the short timeframe, the team was able to migrate all four terabytes of content successfully into Microsoft 365. Documents, versions, dates, user information, metadata, and folder structures were all preserved.
Results
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