Self-service data migration

The Self-service Data Migration process is designed to provide you with the necessary tools, trainings, and guidance for you to successfully migrate your workspaces to RelativityOne. Review Assigning data migration resources to understand the specific job roles and responsibilities involved in performing a self-service data migration.

The self-service data migration process consists of the following three phases:

Additional information to reference for this process includes Data migration resources and Non-Relativity case data considerations.

Assigning data migration resources

If you’ve selected self-service, the most important first step in planning your data migration is to determine the team members that will be working on the process and clearly define their roles. These team members will work closely with Relativity’s team. Note that it is crucial for the below roles to be assigned and that it is fairly common for individuals to be assigned to more than one role.

The following table defines self-service data migration roles and responsibilities.

Organization Role Role definition

Relativity

Data Migration Specialist
  • Project Manager and coordinator of the overall data migration process
  • Guides customer through optimal migration approach and provides insight and feedback for the customer data migration plan
  • Acts as Level 1 – Level 2 technical support
  • Communicates on a regular basis to internal/external stakeholders migration status
  • Escalates to the appropriate Relativity teams to resolve technical issues or address customer concerns

Relativity

Technical Support
  • May be pulled into the data migration project to address and troubleshoot technical issues preventing workspaces from being migrated that the Data Migration Specialist could not resolve.
  • Provides 24/7 day technical support for issues with Relativity or RelativityOne software / systems

Customer

Data Migration Project Manager
  • Project manager and coordinator for customer tasks and activities
  • This person is often performing the work or is the lead liaison for the work team performing the data migration
  • Helps design and signs off on the data migration plan, prioritizes workspaces, and provides information to consider for planning
  • Coordinates the appropriate customer resources to attend meetings and complete tasks

Customer

IT admin
  • Ensures the customer data migration team has the proper permissions to successfully migrate cases to RelativityOne.
  • Installs Relativity desktop applications for the project team
  • Configures network firewall and opens necessary ports to communicate to RelativityOne

Customer

Relativity Case Admin
  • This team member is hands-on with the Relativity application, with a strong knowledge of your use of current Relativity workspaces
  • Works closely with the Customer Data Migration Project Manager to ensure the workspaces are properly prioritized.
  • Assists with the Quality Control process after workspaces are migrated in RelativityOne

(1) Analysis and planning phase

During the analysis and planning phase, Relativity and you will work together to scope the overall data migration project, define timelines, tailor the migration process, identify workspace priorities, and agree upon a communication plan for project stakeholders and end users.

[1] Provide information: Questionnaire

The data migration planning process begins when you are sent a link to a shared data migration questionnaire which contains questions regarding your specific IT infrastructure and data set. Your Relativity Data Migration Specialist may have additional questions as well to help you analyze and plan appropriately.

[2] Kickoff/scoping meeting

After you fill out the questionnaire, Relativity will host a kickoff meeting with you to provide an overview of the data migration process, introduce team members, scope the initial data migration approach, and set expectations on roles and responsibilities.

[3] Draft project plan and approach

After analysis and planning, a draft project plan and approach will be created and agreed upon. Recommended next steps often include a pre-flight case workspace to migrate.

[4] Setting yourself up for success

Relativity will help you prepare for the enablement phase by performing the following:

  • Providing a list of prerequisite data migration training resources to you 
  • Informing you on the high level ins and outs of the data migration process
  • Setting up workflow training sessions with you for performing data migration using the pre-flight workspaces you will choose

Analysis and planning considerations

Scoping your infrastructure and data

  • Questionnaire—When filling out your data migration questionnaire, you may need to involve a variety of resources at your organization including case admins, IT staff, and other technical resources that will be assisting in data migration.
  • Case rollup script—You will be using the case rollup script to populate the list of workspace to migrate. Refer to Case Rollup Script for more information.
  • Applications (custom, ISV, non-core library Relativity applications)—ensure that you make your Relativity data migration specialist aware of any non-standard applications that you may use in your Relativity Server environment.
  • Checking for Common Language Runtime (CLR)—when you customized scripts and applications, it creates a stored procedure in SQL. You must run the CLR script provided by your Relativity data migration specialist so that they can allow list these resources.

Choosing test cases for migration

You will choose several pre-flight workspaces to migrate initially based based on priority and/or volume. These workspaces should have low priority (not urgent for customer, not in review). Choose workspaces whose document count is around the average document count for all workspaces. We recommend choosing a combination of 3-5 workspace that fits each the following properties

  • At least one workspace should contain processing data (if available)
  • At least one workspace should contain analytic indexes (if available)
  • One workspace should contain no processing nor analytic indexes

(2) Enablement and training phase

The Enablement and Training phase is focused on providing you with the necessary training and knowledge for various data migration workflows. This is accomplished with hands-on working sessions; during which Relativity and you will migrate 3 to 4 workspaces together.

[1] Workflow training session(s) (optional)

The data migration enablement and training phase kicks off with "workflow training sessions" for customers who are not technically proficient with data migration tools.

These sessions may use sample data and include the following workflows:

  • Reviewing a pre-archive checklist
  • Data migration process
  • Performing quality control on the migrated data and updating the workbook with metrics and benchmarks

[2] Data migration workshop sessions

Data migration workshop sessions are designed to be a hands-on and interactive.

You will be migrating the pre-flight workspaces from your Relativity Server environment to RelativityOne under the guidance of your Relativity data migration specialist and going through the exact process you will follow when you begin active data migration.

[3] Pre-flight retro session

When pre-flight workspace(s) have been successfully migrated, a retro is convened to review the process and ensure that it's completed successfully and to capture any lessons learned into the data migration project plan. 

During this call, we will go through your list of workspaces and estimate times for migration waves and you will sign off on the agreed upon data migration timeline.

Enablement and training phase considerations

  • Prioritizing your case data—you should prioritize your pre-flight data migration workspaces based on both priority of the information and volume.
  • Capturing data transfer rates—it's important to calculate throughput/data transfer rates based on your pre-flight case migration activity. Assuming variables, we can map out the rest of the project and create a rough estimate of the minimum amount of time it will take to perform your data migration.
  • Performing a quality control review of migrated data—after performing the initial wave migrations, performing a quality control review is important for compare sizes and file counts, pre-migration and post migration to ensure that nothing is missing. If you didn't go through saved searches, indexes, and custom objects before archiving and restoring your data, you should run the Breakage Report in the text migration console.

(3) Migration and support phase

After careful planning, running pre-flight exercises, training on all applications and confirming the plan is finalized, you are ready to conduct your data migration. By this stage, you have been trained on workflows and data migration applications. You are ready to migrate the rest of your data.

[1] Performing your data migration

During the Migration and Support phase, you will be performing the migration of the workspaces in prioritized waves according to the project plan you have created in your Data Migration Workbook.

Work with your Relativity Data Migration Specialist to customize the information sharing you will provide with each wave of data migrations to help insure all your stakeholders are notified. Based on estimated timelines, your Relativity data migration specialist will check in with you before each wave and after each wave to see how the process is going and troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

[2] Data migration retro and closing session

A closing session will be held with all stakeholders to ensure that the data migration was successful and go through the things that went well and any things that did not go well so that we can continually improve our processes and so that any feedback you have can be heard.

Migration and support phase considerations

Communication planning

  • You will need to notify many of your users about the migration schedule – to avoid inconsistencies and extra steps, users should not be coding/reviewing documents in workspaces when they are being migrated.

Downtime window considerations

  • Ensure that migration waves are not scheduled during RelativityOne downtime windows. You will not have access to your environment during these windows. This will cause delays if a migration wave is scheduled for the same time period.

Project tracking and monitoring

  • You should be updating your data migration workbook as you progress in order to make Relativity aware of how your project is going and things that are happening.
  • Although capturing the networking metrics at the workspace level isn't required, you must fill out the following properties for each migrated workspace in your workbook/project plan:
    • Archive creation status
    • Restore creation status
    • Migration completed date

Upgrade and install applications

  • Download and install all the needed data migration tools before beginning a wave of data migration. Ensure that you are using the most current version of the applications for best results.

Scaling your resources

  • Before each wave of migration, work with your data migration specialist to scale your system resources accordingly so that you get the bandwidth that is required for such a large operation.

Issue troubleshooting

  • When you run into errors or other technical issues during a data migration wave, you should contact Relativity Support directly to get the fastest possible response and CC your data migration specialist.

Post migration wave check-ins

  • After each migration wave is complete, it is important to coordinate all teams to confirm:
    • Any remaining items that were not completed
    • Any adjustments needed before the next wave of migrations
    • Any issues that require further remedy or need further discussion
    • Sync on project plan and status and confirm next wave/next steps in the migration (or confirm completion of the project.)

Non-Relativity case data considerations

When you are migrating non-Relativity case data to RelativityOne, the timeline may vary slightly from the process outlined here. You will be converting your case data to load files and then using Import/Export to quickly transfer and load your legacy data into RelativityOne.

Your Relativity Data Migration Specialist will assist you with considerations for this.

Data migration resources

The following list additional resources for considering when performing data migration into RelativityOne: