The UK Department for Education was utilizing ECHO, a customized Meridio EDRMS instance as the primary document and metadata store for their public correspondence system. They also had over 700,000 scanned images which required full text conversion and classification. A lack of searchable digital versions of these items has led to a gap in the completeness of the department’s available digital content portfolio.
The DfE decided to migrate its content to SharePoint Online to: reduce the total cost of ownership of information management, achieve intelligent search for hardcopy documents and images and enable a seamless experience for the department’s existing Office 365 users.
The migration presented several significant challenges:
- Complex legacy platform: DfE’s highly customised Meridio system required in-depth analysis and reverse engineering by the Proventeq team due to a lack of internal platform administration expertise.
- Inconsistent source metadata: File types & extensions were incorrectly stored, requiring a deep file inspection to determine the correct file types prior to migration to SharePoint Online.
- Full text conversion of image scans: Over 700,000 scanned images needed optical character recognition and full text extraction prior to migration to the SharePoint Online.
- High content volume: With over 7 million content items stored in the existing ECHO platform, DfE required full fidelity migration of all content to SharePoint Online.
To ensure that our team met the DfE’s challenges, we developed a strategic step migration and support solution based on both the specific challenges faced by DfE, and our extensive experience in migrating content from Meridio to SharePoint:
- Discovery and Analysis: Migration Accelerator’s rich discovery and analysis capabilities were used to ascertain the true volume and distribution of DfE’s content. During this phase, many inconsistencies in the source content and associated metadata were identified and addressed.
- Information architecture optimization: An in-depth analysis of the ECHO Meridio file structure and metadata schema was used to design an optimal target information architecture. The source system’s folder hierarchy exceeded SharePoint’s URL length limits, which was resolved by loading documents in a shortened folder hierarchy.
- Pilot migration: To demonstrate that the migration design fully met DfE’s project objectives, Proventeq carried out a pilot migration stage. This allowed DfE’s internal team to evaluate the migration and SharePoint Online document management capabilities in a production-like environment.
- OCR conversion of scanned files: The scanned images which the DfE had were in a number of differing formats, including multi-page PDF files, stand-alone images, handwritten and typed documents. Proventeq extracted text from these images and exposed these as metadata thereby making the content searchable.
A unique and complex migration, with problems solved in flight in order to deliver successfully. We have validated that the entire content has been migrated. Return on investment has been proved in terms of our ongoing DfE savings, having moved from Echo Meridio."
Philip Humphries - Head of Knowledge & Information
“A unique and complex migration, with problems solved in flight in order to deliver successfully. We have validated that the entire content has been migrated. Return on investment has been proved in terms of our ongoing DfE savings, having moved from Echo Meridio.”
Philip Humphries, Head of Knowledge & Information, Department of Education
The migration to SharePoint Online delivered significant benefits to New Forest District Council:
- Smarter content and search: The DfE leveraged Migration Accelerator’s OCR functionality to convert over 700,000 documents that were previously stored as non-searchable images. Plus, it has the power to consolidate content intelligently in a centralized online repository in SharePoint.
- Increased productivity: By migrating to SharePoint Online, the Records Management team at the DfE can execute longer-term plans for including retention labels and making it clearer when certain items need to be destroyed using intelligent automation. This will save on costs and time.
- Reduced risk of content loss: The risk of content loss presented by the previous unsupported Enterprise Content Management system that the DfE was using has now been removed, thanks to the inbuilt content administration capabilities made available within SharePoint Online.
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searchable documents
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