Don’t Fall for Push Button Migration Solutions

As we are rounding out our summer “Migrating to Series”, and with the arrival of fall, we wanted to write a little piece about not fall-ing for push button migration solutions. We have talked about this in each of our webinars and white papers because we commonly have people come to us after their migration failed. In many cases, the organizations that come to us had used a push-button migration tool or solution and didn’t reach their expected results. While push-button migration tools sound like a dream come true, they have been known to lead organization begging for help after they have failed. Don’t get us wrong, for smaller, straightforward migrations it may make sense, but if your objective is to migrate millions of documents across multiple repositories, with customized or complicated metadata schemes, you need to be cautious when selecting a migration solution. Here is what we suggest:

1. Really take into consideration the scope of your migration. While it is easy to be caught up in deadlines and budget constraints, you want to make your migration successful the first time around. Most push-button solutions offer overnight migrations, but it may work in your favor to have a more synchronized migration. Synchronized migrations typically last longer but users are less impacted by downtime and sufficient time is allowed for testing and perfection of the migration paths.
2. Find a solution that can do both. While you don’t want to constrain yourself to just a synced migration, find a solution that can provide you the best of both worlds. In this instance, you can run heavier loads during operation downtimes while still continuously synchronizing content during the work week.
3. Get more realistic about your timelines and budgets. Migrations are a long process if you’re doing them right. Setting realistic goals is going to play in your favor. Take a lot of time to plan your migration as well. Run migration tests, clean up your old data and work on your metadata mapping. These things are going to be vital to the overall success of a migration.
4. A migration solution should make planning, metadata mapping, and custom scripting easy. Push-button solutions are not typically as robust as other solutions like SeeUnity’s Velocity Content Migration. Our solution makes metadata mapping as simple as dragging and dropping, and our custom scripting is preloaded with code to make it much less time consuming to users. In addition, our solution lets users run test migrations to give them a realistic timeline and a view into how the actual migration is going to look before you push the “go” button on the project.

While it may be tempting to select a migration solution that markets itself as a push-button solution, you must be aware that they can cause more issues down the road. Look for a migration solution that can do both blackout and synchronized migrations, get realistic about your timelines and budgets, and find a solution that makes all the steps involved in your project easier.