Migrating Content: Our Experience and Best Practices

ImageSource has worked with countless customer partners over the years to migrate databases, content, and images. We have developed a map with known roadblocks, detours, and great shortcuts to get your data to its destination intact.

Understand your current system customizations

Most organizations optimize, tweak, and work around the abilities of a data repository or content destination, often over several years. We recommend devoting time upfront to documenting the workflow and use cases of users

A written guide helps IT decision-makers clearly understand user’s needs, any trade-offs, limitations, or improvements that await your migration project. To create user acceptance, you can document requirements and constraints, share them with users and stakeholders, and deliver.

Consolidate components

Migration projects allow you to rethink the complex route your data and documents take, in addition to user access utilities and document security tools. Our experience shows organizations have a mix of tools from a combination of providers solving various problems. How many of your users have a PDF conversion tool on their desktop? Or hit a free web-based converter? Going through the planning processes and working closely with a solution provider with experience reveals opportunities to reply on a single platform or a reduced set of tools for your migration and future document and data storage. This reduces costs, reduces downtime, and improves security.

Enable your data

Behaviors we consistently see in content migration are:
• A meaningful document management system
• Users searching for content with self-determined keywords
• Unfound documents are found elsewhere (most likely a departmental file share)
• Users duplicating content by saving it to a desktop or emailing a colleague

Bottom line: All these practices proliferate content and bypass governance and security policies. Instead, we recommend:

• Creating full-text searchable documents
• Applying consistent check policies to locate and remove duplicates from multiple network locations
• Implementing integration to your organization’s established security policies

This can save your users hours searching for “lost” documents, reduce wasted storage space, and improve data security.

What does your data look like? Are your documents fully searchable? Are they organized in a way that is relevant to user behavior? Are documents in multiple locations?

• content and system migration