Livelink Revitalisation & Migration

Background

The client, one of Europe's largest independent oil and gas exploration and production companies, had previously implemented a Livelink system around their various sites across three continents. Adoption of the system was not as widespread as planned and Venture was approached as part of an initiative to revitalize and relaunch the application.

As part of this programme we were asked to migrate the content for various business functions to the new, globally architected Livelink application. The Human Resource department had been identified as a quick win, and Venture provided the capabilities to migrate globally dispersed HR content, from across three Livelink instances and four windows shares to the new Livelink system.

The existing content, in all its forms, needed to be scanned, file plans created and mappings generated to migrate files into the new Livelink system in the UK.

Outcome

The Venture V-KIT tools for File Scanning, Analysis and Migration were enhanced to meet the requirements of the client. The file scanning was used to scan each of the file shares. A new scanner for Livelink content was built to scan the three Livelink HR content areas and enable the creation of file plans as the basis for creation of mapping spread sheets. In conjunction with the business users a new file plan was created and mappings created.

For some remote locations, the analysis engine was enhanced to generate a delta or difference between multiple scans. This meant that additional time could be allowed during the migration process for tasks such as user training. It also allowed migrations to occur out of hours.

The migration utilities of V-KIT were built for Livelink to create import Xml files to facilitate the loading of content from these systems into the new Livelink HR locations. Further analysis was provided as part of the import validation.

A significant achievement was the management of the business change. A business function of largely non-technical HR users spread across seven countries were persuaded to give up their country based silos of information, and move to a new global information structure, embrace new concepts such as metadata, and adopt an all new system. This was just as significant a challenge as those posed by the technology.

Benefits

The client was able to migration each HR area with minimal manual intervention, just following a few simple procedural steps at remote and head office locations. The migration process was completed for each location in just a few hours, saving many days of effort, something that would have been impossible without the use of V-KIT.

In conjunction with the move to the new system, Venture assisted in developing a ‘philosophy' document around the new structure, explaining to users not only the rules around the new area, but the thinking behind those rules and practices in order to fully engage with HR users on their terms. These are now in place and in full use.