Migrating from Livelink to SharePoint Online

After the merger of the Dutch and German regions of a large energy company, the organization needed a new multilingual corporate intranet in SharePoint 2010. The source systems were Livelink and SharePoint 2007. One intranet was in German, the other in Dutch. This is how automating the migration from Livelink to SharePoint online helped launch a new-and-improved intranet.

Inventory

First we inventoried the existing intranet environments. Structure, visible pages and documents, and metadata were combined into an inventory that was the starting point for the mapping process.

Navigational Mapping

An English-language target navigational structure was designed. The German and Dutch content was mapped onto the new SharePoint structure. We made sure language variations of the same page were linked to the right piece of structure.

Structural Mapping

A mapping was also performed at content-type level. We plotted metadata from existing content types against the available corresponding target content types. The metadata values were re-used in the right places.

Cleaning & Metadata Enrichment

The transformation to XML – needed for automatic input into the target system – was used to clean and enrich the content. The lay-out of the articles was made more consistent, clean XHTML written, and extra metadata added.

XML Importer

We developed a content importer that we connected to the SharePoint API. The importer read the transformed XML and automatically created sub sites, pages, and documents in SharePoint 2010.

Customer Benefits

How did the client benefit from our approach for migration from Livelink to SharePoint Online?

• There was no content freeze; the “old” intranets were online and up-to-date until the completion of the project.
• There was close to no data loss (<0,5%).
• The content migration time was considerably shorter compared to other methods.
• Conversion costs were lower compared to alternative methods and other suppliers.

 Xillio offers LiveLink to SharePoint Online migrations as a service. This means fixed price and with a guaranteed successful outcome. Read more about our content migration services. 

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