US Real Estate Investment Trust centralizes content and archives through massive migration
An equity real estate investment trust (REIT) in the USA, managing apartment homes nationwide, embarked on a digital transformation journey to modernize content management and streamline compliance. The REIT faced the challenge of migrating around 120 million files—including proprietary email formats and archived content—from IBM FileNet P8 to Microsoft 365's SharePoint and Exchange Online. Consulting partners Olive + Goose and Proventeq designed a strategic, phased migration, leveraging Proventeq’s AI/Deep Learning-powered Migration Accelerator to manage complexity, maintain audit trails, and enable high-throughput transfer. The solution involved content discovery, a pilot migration, incremental migrations by department, and parallelization to surpass 1 million items migrated per day. Key technical difficulties included conversion of IBM’s legacy email formats, restoration of Lotus emails with or without attachments, and ensuring compliance through a robust audit trail. The migration enabled decommissioning of legacy platforms, significantly reduced annual licensing costs, freed up 20TB of storage, and vastly improved eDiscovery speed on the Microsoft platform. The REIT's IT and Security leadership praised the professionalism and expertise of both partners, crediting them for ensuring a smooth transition.
- Organization
- Real Estate Investment Trust
- Industry
- Real Estate
- Location
- United States
- Published
- June 2020
Reported outcomes
Strategic outcomes
Primary read
Use case focus
Showing 3 of 3
- 1Intelligent Large-Scale Content and Email Migration
- 2Automated Migration with AI-powered Compliance Audit
- 3Legacy Platform Decommissioning and Content Centralization
- Migrate 120 million files from IBM FileNet P8 to SharePoint and Exchange Online.
- Convert emails from IBM proprietary (.CSN) to Microsoft (.MSG) format.
- Restore thousands of archived Lotus emails and preserve attachments appropriately.
- Maintain detailed audit trails for email and document migration to ensure compliance.
- Split migration across multiple SharePoint Site Collections/Libraries due to platform limits.
- Reduce manual effort and operational cost in eDiscovery requests and storage.
- Strategic, six-step migration plan executed by Olive + Goose and Proventeq.
- Utilized Proventeq’s AI-powered Migration Accelerator for content discovery, analysis, and audit.
- Staged migrations by department using incremental and high-throughput techniques.
- Parallel operations to achieve over 1 million items migrated daily.
- Restored all emails and documents to appropriate Microsoft 365 destinations, preserving compliance.
- Over $100,000/year licensing savings by decommissioning legacy platform.
- Freed 20TB of storage through content centralization.
- High-throughput migration (1M+ items/day) enabled rapid transition.
- Significantly reduced manual eDiscovery effort and improved search experience.
- Smooth transition minimized business disruption.
Architecture
Proventeq’s Migration Accelerator was used for content analytics, intelligent classification, and automated migration. The solution included drill-down discovery, pre-migration checks, pilot migrations, staged departmental migrations, and high-throughput operations in parallel—splitting data across SharePoint Site Collections to align with technical limitations. Lotus email archives were selectively restored to Exchange Online or SharePoint, ensuring detailed audit and compliance tracking throughout.
Implementation partners2
Sources & evidence1
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