The purpose with this report is to present the findings from the project work performed at Ipendo Systems. The goal was to develop a methodological support for the migration process and implement a web portal for migration of data.
When a company acquires a new application to perhaps replace a legacy system, or to improve their efficiency and there by their competitiveness, the company’s data need to be transferred into the new application. The process of transfer the data from a source to a target is called data migration. Because the source and target systems probably have a somewhat different architecture some transformation to the data has to be made.
The project is divided in two parts, a theoretical part where I learned about data migration and developed a methodological support for data migration projects. The second part of the thesis work was practical designed and I developed a data transformation portal.
Data migrations are often a somewhat forgotten activity in a project. It is sometimes carried out without a proper plan or structure. To bring some structure to this important process I developed a methodological support. The methodological support is made like a guide for how to conduct data migration projects. The purpose of the methodological support is to make data migrations more visible as an own project and add more structure to it. The methodological support is divided into five phases. The five phases are planning, analysis, design, implementation and validation. Every step has its own milestones and deliverables so the support could be used as a sort of checklist during the project.
The purpose with a data transformation portal is to gather all data migration to one common area without a third-party migration tool and minimize the technical complexity associated with data migration projects. I have developed two modules for the portal. The first module concerns migration from an Excel document to a SharePoint list.
The second module handles upload of documents to a SharePoint document library. The portal has functionality like data mapping, validation and setting of metadata. Migration of data is a specific process, depending of the type of data that should be migrated it requires a somewhat different approach. A data transformation portal which can visually monitor, filter, transform and import various types of data to and from various data sources would facilitate the migration process.
Source: Linköping University
Author: Andersson, Sara