How to Migrate Data from Alfresco to SharePoint in a Short Time frame?

A lack of internal resources dedicated to maintaining your legacy ECM system, such as Alfresco, may prompt your organization to transition to a more modern cloud-based solution like SharePoint. If you need to migrate thousands of documents from your Alfresco instance to SharePoint but are constrained by time, consider following these steps.

When you need to meet a tight time frame, find a vendor that has enough experience with both systems and can perform a one-on-one migration from Alfresco to SharePoint without first having several planning meetings and workshops. The first step in migrating Alfresco to SharePoint will be a fast dump of all Alfresco content.

In addition, the exported Alfresco content must be analyzed so that the results can be used to create the transformation mapping. Because of the automatic provisioning of the SharePoint structure, there is no need to set up sites, libraries, and metadata manually.

Step 3: Test
After reaching an agreement on the mappings, run a test import to SharePoint. Based on that test and some optimizations, the final migration can be done.


Step 4: Clean up content
When doing a one-on-one migration to meet the deadline, cleaning up content (such as duplicates) can be handled in an additional project.

During this project, all content will be analyzed, and ROT content will be deleted or archived.


Considerations
When dealing with large volumes, an iterative approach where the Alfresco migration is done in groups of sites is advisable. This way, there is a minimum content freeze on a particular site. After a few successful migrations, the first migration street can be duplicated to speed the process.


Migration-as-a-service
For one of its customers, Xillio migrated all 600.000 documents from over 600 sites from their Alfresco instance to SharePoint with its Migration-as-a-Service approach. According to the customer, Xillio had the most agile approach of all vendors they reached out to. “Xillio understood that we wanted it fast and therefore directly went into the technical aspects of the project without having multiple project planning meetings. In addition, they were one of the few companies that were comfortable in both Alfresco and SharePoint. It was exactly what we needed.”


Rather migrate content to Alfresco? Have a look at this page to find out more about the possibilities for migrations and integrations from/to Alfresco.