Real estate investment trust accelerates migration of 120M files to Office 365 with Proventeq

Published on June 29, 2020

Summary

This equity real estate investment trust (REIT) develops, redevelops, acquires, and manages distinctive apartment homes in some of the best locations in the United States.

To centralize content storage and simplify eDiscovery, the organization was looking to migrate a large volume of content from IBM FileNet P8 to SharePoint.

They chose Olive + Goose, working in partnership with Proventeq to discover, analyze, transform, and migrate their content to SharePoint.

The Olive + Goose and Proventeq team not only met the challenges that the complex migration project presented, but also fully leveraged SharePoint’s content management and user productivity potential.

Challenge

The team encountered technical complexity while converting emails from the IBM proprietary email (.CSN) format to the Microsoft (.MSG) format. The source IBM FileNet and DB2 platform was unable to handle the large number of concurrent requests, and a solution was needed. Migration work had to be split across multiple Site Collections and Libraries to stay within the SharePoint technical design recommendations.

Archived Lotus emails, with attachments, needed to be restored within Exchange Online, and emails without attachments restored to SharePoint. The organization required a full audit trail of the emails converted and migrated to ensure that all the valid emails were successfully migrated.

Strategy

To meet the specific challenges and project requirements of migrating the organization’s business content to SharePoint, Olive + Goose and Proventeq proposed and executed a strategic six-step migration solution utilizing the advanced features of Proventeq’s Migration Accelerator product. This included:

  • Identifying potential issues that could have affected the migration process via the drill-down discovery reports and pre-migration checks provided by Migration Accelerator.
  • Shaping an efficient migration strategy and designing the target information structure to fit within the SharePoint online technical design recommendations.
  • Giving the organization the opportunity to test their existing data in a production-like target environment through a pilot migration.
  • Using incremental migration features in Migration Accelerator to stage the production migration for the organization on a departmental basis to minimize business impact.
  • High throughput migration with more than 1 million items migrated per day throughout the project. Multiple instances of Migration Accelerator were running in parallel to facilitate this outcome.

Migrating from a legacy eDiscovery platform to SharePoint, was not an easy task, but Proventeq made it look easy.
This project is saving us about $100,000 in licensing annual cost, 20TB of storage and countless number of hours performing eDiscovery requests using an 8-year-old platform. Everything went smooth, on time and every project meeting was meaningful.
O+G and Proventeq are a team of professionals that I would recommend any time, for similar projects.

(Director of IT Security Operations, Real estate investment trust)

Results

The organization has been able to make significant licensing and infrastructure costs savings by decommissioning the IBM FileNet archiving & eDiscovery platform.

Moving the archived content from IBM FileNet, Proventeq and Olive + Goose were able to help reduce the time spent searching for and working with content by taking advantage of Office 365’s eDiscovery platform, which provides a much better search experience compared to the legacy counterpart.