Simplifying a complex migration
The magnitude of a migration from on-prem to the cloud may seem daunting at first. But with precise planning and clear delegation of responsibilities, NICC felt confident moving forward. “The migration was a huge undertaking. You're disconnecting thousands of connections and then putting them all back together,” said Kieffer.
“Fortunately, Softdocs did most of the heavy lifting. We set up the hybrid server separately from the production servers we were using at the time, and Softdocs created the cloud system. One of the things I liked was that it was basically a standalone system we could test. We could make sure everything was working and move forward confidently before the final cutover.”
Though the migration plan and responsibilities were clear and Kieffer felt confident about moving forward, he couldn’t shake the concern about losing “control” of key databases. “From my on-prem admin perspective, I was reluctant to give up access to the database,” said Kieffer. “Not only because I want to see what's going on there, but also we were running several reports through Informer that referenced the Etrieve Content database specifically, and we didn't want to lose access to those.”
“So we created a linked database, which is a read-only version of the databases we're still able to query. I can't run any update statements on it or affect the data, but we can query the data that is there. I think we have hundreds of reports using this process, so it was a big deal for us to keep that access. Softdocs worked with us to make that solution happen. Then once the system was up, we simply made sure all the processes worked the way we needed. By the first week after migration, everything was 100%.”
As NICC continues to discover the benefits of its cloud-based document management and process automation platform, the expectation is to continue to scale the operational efficiencies more quickly to more areas. “We're a heavy user of Softdocs across campus. I don't think there's a department that doesn't have at least one or two Softdocs processes running,” said Kieffer. “It's a continual kind of growth, and we are always striving to add more process automation whenever we get the chance.”