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By Scott Maloney, Senior Project Manager

One of your greatest fears just became a reality: your 15-year-old platform is going unsupported in 18 months. Meaning you have to manage what feels like an insurmountable task: a content migration.

Crap.

Now what do you do? Where do you begin? Your organization has millions of documents….

Well, a good place to start is by deciding where the content will be housed and how you are going to move those millions of documents and associated data to the new system.

For every content migration project, there are two main aspects:

  1. Extraction: Pulling all of the document images and metadata out of the source system.
  2. Ingestion: Putting all the extracted content into the new system.

Note: When migrating content to a new system you may have to convert the content if the file formats are outdated and not supported by the new system. A couple examples of document formats that may require additional attention include COLD documents and older generation HTML-formatted files.

With just two major steps to think about, it sounds pretty easy, but it’s not. Content migrations have a lot of moving parts that you need to think about and it’s easy to miss something.

Having done an obscene number of migrations, I created a worksheet that helps me and the team I work with to start off on the right foot. It lays out the plan for the hardware and software that we will need to support the migration process.

Content migrations are complex projects that have potential to take a lot longer than planned and cost a lot more than planned too. Hopefully this worksheet guides you and helps you avoid some common mistakes I have made in the past.

Here at Pyramid Solutions, we consider ourselves experts in content migrations because of the range of migrations we’ve performed. I recommend checking out this list of migration FAQs and some things to consider to avoid a migration disaster to learn more.

Scott Maloney

Scott Maloney

About the Author: What I enjoy most about working for Pyramid Solutions is that we’re helping companies leverage technology to fix processing pain. When not at work, I have a pretty extensive collection of vintage Matchbox cars so I enjoy the thrill of the hunt filling in gaps in my collection.