Your Situation
Your eRoom installation has been in operation for years, and thousands of rooms and, naturally, terabytes of data have been accumulated. It is never quite clear whether these rooms are being actively used or whether they have not been in use for a long time. When migrating, this leads to avoidable risks arising from data that is no longer used and also has no more value for the company.
In most companies, the owners (coordinators) of the rooms in question have to be consulted as to whether such unused rooms and data can be archived, deleted, or migrated. This involves an enormous amount of manpower if you want to implement it manually and in a timely manner.
The size of most eRoom installations means that a complete migration can be expected to last anything from a few days to several months. Simply stated, a migration cannot therefore take place “over the weekend.” It needs to be done room by room with constant monitoring.
This situation means that you can only make very general statements about the following points that are critical for a migration:
- Expected duration of the migration
- Expected cost of the migration (tools and personnel costs)
- Possible risks during the implementation of a migration (from a technical point of view and for users)
- Expected loss of data and functions by the relevant target system (for example, eRoom migration to CenterStage V1.1)
The above situation applies to many existing eRoom installations. Implementing a successful and monitored migration requires a method that takes the above points into consideration.
Based on its many years of experience with eRoom migrations, YADA has developed a method to migrate eRoom systems so that migration is a complete success from the point of view of both the IT department and the users.
The Approach
A successful migration from eRoom into any target system can be achieved by finding a balance between the following important success factors for the migrated data:
- Completeness
- Preservation of the context
- Usability
Achieving this requires precise analysis and planning, since severe constraints may arise for the possible target systems, with regard to Microsoft SharePoint, for example.
Functionality of “eRoom | Migration Managers” at the room level:
1. Analysis and Classification
The first important step is to analyze and classify all rooms on the eRoom server in order to be able to make precise statements about the three success factors listed above. For this purpose, 90 values are determined per room and rules are created based on the data collected in order to be able to allocate all rooms on the system to a unique category (see “eRoom | Usage Analyzer” for a more detailed description of this module).
2. Preparation
The purpose of this phase is to communicate with users about the upcoming migration of rooms. Once the users have been informed and there are no more obstacles, the room is “frozen” for the period of migration so that content can no longer be modified.
3. Archiving
A room can be archived fully automatically if required by law or set forth by company guidelines (see “eRoom | offlineExplorer” for information on archiving room content).
4. Migration
As soon as a room fulfils the requirements for migration, “Migration Manager” triggers the process and the room can then be migrated using various tools available on the market (for example, “RedCarpet” or “Buldoser Center” from Crown Partners).
5. Deletion
After a successful migration, a room can be provided in read-only mode for a transitional period before being permanently deleted from the system later.
