It was great working with AvePoint on our SharePoint migration as they were very flexible to our organisational needs and met all of our timelines for the project.
In order to share information with staff and foster collaboration, DEECD utilised SharePoint 2010 as its intranet portal. In addition to collaboration sites, staff accessed the portal in order to keep up with organisational news, events, and departmental information.
DEECD’s public-facing website, however, was created and maintained with EMC Documentum. While the content on the intranet portal and public-facing website were intended for different audiences, the organisation ultimately needed one system to support both purposes. The organisation chose SharePoint 2010 as that system, which would enable DEECD’s intranet portal and public-facing website to share one server environment instead of two required by using separate systems.
To migrate its web content from Documentum to SharePoint, DEECD investigated carrying out the process manually. “We found a manual migration would be extremely labor intensive,” Lee said. “Our largest site was 8,000 pages, and we estimated one person could migrate approximately 20 pages per day, so the process could have taken as long as 400 days for a person or 40 days with 10 people, and that does not account for the possibility of human error.”
In order to minimise time and effort, DEECD sought a thirdparty software vendor to help carry out its migration.
A manager at DEECD learned about DocAve Documentum Migrator and Website Migrator for SharePoint by AvePoint. DocAve allows administrators to easily automate the processes of consolidating multiple Documentum content sources and carrying out lossless transfer of web content into SharePoint. “We learned that DocAve could migrate our legacy content as well as its associated metadata,” Lee said. “For web content management, metadata is an important part of search engine optimisation, and without DocAve we would have needed to enter all of it into SharePoint manually.”
In order to carry out the migration DEECD engaged AvePoint Partner Services (APPS) team. APPS enables customers to utilize AvePoint’s vast research and development resources to deliver custom-built solutions, services, and applications to meet organisations’ specific business objectives. APPS helps customers migrate content, functions, and processes from legacy systems though collaborative analysis of legacy systems’ functions and features as well as expedient SharePoint migration with minimal business disruption. “Our experience with the APPS team was great,” said Pavithra Kamath, Project Officer at DEECD. “They worked within our timeline and were flexible toward all of our needs throughout the migration process.”
With DocAve and a migration plan in place, the APPS team began carrying out the SharePoint migration for DEECD in earnest. All web content was migrated into SharePoint in bulk, including all code, HTML regions, imbedded tables, related documents, and associated images. As needs required, all migration tasks were carried out swiftly and with full fidelity, transferring all metadata to the new SharePoint environment. “APPS was able to migrate all 8,000 pages from our largest site in only 20 days,” Lee said. “This was 95 percent faster than the time a manual migration would have required.”
In total, APPS used DocAve to migrate more than 11,000 pages from Documentum to SharePoint for DEECD. The time savings made possible through this method helped administrators focus on preparing its staff for the new system. “It was great working with AvePoint on our SharePoint migration as they were very flexible to our organisational needs and met all of our timelines for the project,” Lee said. “We are now working to train everyone and get them used to SharePoint as a web content management system.”
The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) offers learning and development support, services, and resources for all Victorians, from birth to adulthood.
It was great working with AvePoint on our SharePoint migration as they were very flexible to our organisational needs and met all of our timelines for the project.