Situation

Companies Registry, an operating group of the department, maintains the register and records of all companies and other business types incorporated in the Isle of Man, and provides a facility for the public to view documents which have been filed.

Companies Registry had been an early adopter of document imaging and document management technology.  Such foresight provided enormous benefits to the organisation.  After a number of years, however, the document management system employed had reached end-of-life.  This presented a risk as the system held millions of documents which needed to be retained for a significant period of time.

As a result of this situation the Registry identified a migration of data to a new platform as a suitable way forward.

Challenge

• Migration of over 2 million documents and meta data from a legacy document management system source to a Microsoft SharePoint destination.
• High volume of source documents.
• Different document types in the source.
• Different document profiles in the source.
• Minimal tolerance for data loss.
• Scanned images in the source stored in TIFF imaging format using a legacy compression algorithm.
• Source archive still being updated.

Solution

• Migration of data into Microsoft SharePoint.
• Design of SharePoint archive to scale to number of documents being migrated.
• Enhancement of Microsoft SharePoint search capabilities to reproduce the capabilities of the source system.
• High performance, high volume migration process.
• Reconciliation of source and destination systems.
• Conversion of imaged (scanned) documents to Adobe PDF/A for long term data storage.
• Handling legacy TIFF.
• Managed migration, handling user’s requirements to update the archive.

Benefits

• Reduced platform and risk with migration to a supported platform.
• Reduced platform risk with improved solution documentation and handover to client staff.
• Increased infrastructure efficiency by using existing Microsoft SharePoint infrastructure.
• Assisted the client in achieving compliance with a supported platform and image format.