Data rooms serve as the front lines of many businesses’ everyday operations. They house sensitive content that’s essential to how a company operates, and they make it easy for employees to collaborate on projects. With this in mind, a smooth data room migration is crucial to prevent workflow interruptions during the switch. So whether you’re moving data rooms because of incomplete or lackluster features or because you’re making a complete digital transformation, here are four steps that will ensure your migration goes smoothly:
Decide on your reasons for migrating
When deciding whether to migrate your VDR, you must ask yourself the following questions:
- Why should you migrate? What are the benefits of migrating? What are the costs of migrating?
- How much time do you have to migrate? What is your budget for migrating?
- What is your timeline for migrating?
Take an inventory of all the content in your existing data room
When planning your migration, it is important to understand all the content that needs to be migrated. This includes files, images, videos, presentations, and other documents. It may also include source code or applications that are used by the data room participants regularly.
To do this effectively, you need to take an inventory of all your existing content so that you can determine which items will need special attention during the migration process. To do this, you’ll want to inventory each item from one end of its lifecycle (creation) through its use (in production). You should then organize according to importance and urgency based on what happens next with each piece of information/resource (e-mailing/sharing internally vs publishing externally versus printing out hard copies).
Assess and optimize the quality of your content
Assessing and optimizing the quality of your content is essential to a successful virtual data room migration. The difference between these two terms may be confusing, but they are inextricably linked. Assessing your content means checking which parts need to be modified or enhanced before you can optimize them.
Decide how to organize your content
As you’re planning your data room migration, it’s important to decide how you’ll organize the content. A good organizational structure will be logical and easy for reviewers to follow. The best way to do this is by creating categories at the topic level and not at the document level.
For example, if you were transferring documents related to legal contracts, instead of organizing each contract document, group them by topic: “contracts” in one folder and “employment contracts” in another folder. This would allow reviewers to view all contracts as a whole without having to navigate through every single one individually.
Migrating involves more than simply transferring data
Data room migration is an important and complex process that should not be taken lightly. While you may be tempted to simply send over your files and call it a day, there are many factors involved in successfully migrating your data room.
It can be tempting to view a data room migration as a simple matter of copying and pasting files. However, this is not the case. There are many important details involved in migrating your data effectively and securely. A successful data room migration involves more than just moving the content from one location to another; it also involves ensuring that any necessary metadata is carried over as well—a task which can prove challenging if you have hundreds of different files containing different types of metadata (such as tags).
