This section describes important terms and concepts that are used throughout this guide. It’s
strongly recommended that you read and understand this section before reviewing the rest of
the User Guide.

Staging Database

This is the SQL database that gets created during the product installation. It holds all the configuration information that will be specified as well as the metadata of every source item and their status.

Source

The Source is where items are to be migrated from.

Target

The Target is where items are going to be migrated to.

Containers

This term is used to describe an object which can contain items. So a Folder, a Document Library, cabinet, workspace are all different types of Containers.

Migration Jobs

Migration jobs are the basic framework for a migration. A Migration Job consists of: -

• Details of Source and Target
• Settings to determine how source data should transferred in the target
• Settings to control the Migration.

All operations run within the context of a Migration job. Migration projects are generally split
into multiple migration jobs. The order in which the migration jobs get processed depends
upon criteria such as data volume and business priorities etc.

Discovery

Discovery runs in the context of a job and is the first operation that needs to be run after a job is created. During Discovery, information on items, folder/container structures, types of content and security information is collected from the source specified in the current Job and stored in the PCS staging database. Item contents are not captured during discovery.

The items discovered can be seen using the Items List feature.

Depending upon the size of the environment, Discovery could take several hours or more to complete.

Pre-Checks

The Pre-Checks feature is set of configurable, pre-defined checks that are run against the information gathered by the Discovery process. It can identify many potential issues that may prevent a succesful migration into the target, looking at things like target system restrictions, limitations, empty files and duplicate file names. The result of running Pre-check is a PowerBI report where issues can be reviewed.

Example of a Power BI report after running Pre-Checks.

Migration Settings

These settings control several features related to how data is migrated.

The Structure Mapping feature gives control over how the folders/containers in the source should be represented in the target. It provides the ability to simply use the existing hierarchy structure or restructure the folders as part of the migration.

Content Types Terms

Metadata is the term for properties of an item, for example Author or Created Date.

Content Type – A content management system will contain many types of items such as document, folders, invoices etc. These are known as ‘Content Types’. In some systems these may also be known as Document Types/Classes/Categories or Object Types. There are both Source Content Types (what the source system supports) and Target Content Types (what the target system supports). Each content type may have different metadata fields associated with it.

The Content Type Mapping feature controls how properties of a particular Source Content Type are mapped to a specified Target Content Type. For example, when an item of Source Content Type ‘Invoice’ is migrated, an item of type ‘Legacy Invoice’(as defined by Content Type Mapping settings) should be created in the target and the metadata mapping information(see below) will be used to determine how metadata properties in the target item should be populated. PCS ships with very useful defaults mappings and these can be customised as required.

The Metadata Mapping feature controls how each target metadata property is populated for each target content type e.g. how the ‘Description’ or ‘Amount’ metadata properties is populated for the ‘Legacy Invoice’ Target Content Type.

PCS ships with very useful content type mapping defaults and applies these (this is termed

Automated Content Type Mapping). They can be customised as required.

Custom Classification is an advanced feature that allows items in source to be mapped and processed based upon their metadata properties, overriding the content type assigned in source. See Custom Classification for more information.

Security Mapping is used to define how Users, Groups and permissions types from the source should be represented on the item in the target. For example if the Created By of a source document is “Percy Shelley” then in the target the Created By should be Percy.Shelley@acme.com (because in SharePoint this field is required to be an smtp address).

Shortcut Links These are items in the source system which are pointers to an item in another location. Some platforms support these calling them Shortcuts or Links. In some occasions there may even be several of these links pointing to a single source document, this is known as multi-filing.

Note: The use of shortcuts in SharePoint is generally not recommended.

Embedded Links These are pointers contained within documents that link to another item. e.g. a Word document stored in Documentum may contain an Embedded Link to another Documentum item.

Note: Both the shortcut links and embedded links features will impact migration speed if enabled.

Migration

Migration is a set of individual steps listed below to prepare and then load items into the target. These sequential steps can be executed individually so that in the early phase of the migration project the output of each can be verified before executing subsequent steps.

The Item Manifest is a data structure that contains all the information about an item to be migrated, excluding the item content itself. It will contain the location where an item should be migrated to, all the values for the target metadata fields and so on. Steps 1-2 provide the information for Step 3 which creates this structure for each item.

The processing steps are sequential, so an item will first be processed by Step 1, then Step 2 and so on.

Step 1 Extract – Captures metadata for each source item into the PCS Staging database.

Step 2 Classify – Determine what the target content type of the item should be based upon the extracted meta data from step 1,or custom classification rules and source->target content type mapping configuration.

Step 3 Transform – Uses the output from Step 2 as well as information from structure, content type and security settings to create a data structure for each item called the Item Manifest.

Step 4 Load – Retrieves the item content from the source and combines it with the Item Manifest from Step 3 and uploads this into the target.

Packaging

To improve migration speed, items are ‘packaged’ before uploading to SharePoint.

Note: During the pilot phase of the migration, or after reconfiguration, it is strongly recommended to run each of the 4 steps above seperately and the results reviewed before executing the next step.