Hosted Legacy DMS to Gallery: 6 Due Diligence Questions to Ask Your Extraction Vendor

When it comes to data extraction and conversion projects, hosted legacy environments present more significant technical challenges than their on-prem counterparts do. You can learn more about these hurdles here:

How can you be sure a vendor has the skills and experience to deliver on your hosted data exit?

These are six questions Davey Rowan recommends asking before you commit to an extraction vendor for a hosted Gallery migration (and his reasoning behind each):

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Question 1:

“Will data be required to leave our environment at any point during this project?”

The answer to this question will tell you a lot. If a vendor needs to take your data into their own environment to do the work, you’re looking at a security review before anything starts, and taking on unnecessary exposure. Your data does not need to leave your environment in order for the migration to be successful, in fact, in a successful migration, data should not leave.

Question 2:

“What have you found in a hosted environment that surprised you?”

Not what they expect to find, what they actually found. A team that has done this will have specific answers; vague answers should give you pause. If a vendor can’t provide clear, confident answers to this question, it’s fair to assume your migration may be one of their first.

Question 3:

“What is your customer support model after regular business hours?”

Issues don’t operate on business days; when something goes wrong in the middle of the night or on a holiday weekend, who answers the phone, and how fast? A vendor who is truly invested in the success of your Gallery migration will have round-the-clock support built into their program.

Question 4:

“What’s your plan to get data from our legacy cloud vendor?”

The DMS to Gallery landscape is changing fast, and new hosting security protocols will soon, if not already, prevent access via shipped drive. If your vendor is planning to request a drive from your legacy system, then they have not worked on a hosted third party extraction to Gallery recently.

Question 5:

“How does your team handle extraction and conversion of especially large documents/files without disrupting the process?”

Think documents with hundreds of pages or large file sizes. An advanced team should be practiced at taking on these instances without incurring any interruptions to the project’s regular timeline and workflow. They should also be willing and able to provide concrete examples of how they have managed projects of various sizes.

Question 6:

“Will I have real-time access to your team’s progress, or will I be waiting on status update meetings?”

Advanced extraction and conversion programs happen live. If you don’t have full visibility into the process with real-time reporting, that could be a sign your vendor doesn’t have a mature or active program. You shouldn’t have to wait until your weekly or monthly status meetings. Having real-time visibility into your project at any given moment removes the guess work of where it stands and when it will be completed.

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