Migrating 100+ customers off the IBM cloud in 3 months using HCL Connections

Let’s take a look at how Three Thirds Collaboration used Connections to help migrate 100+ customers off the IBM cloud in 3 months.

How did all this migration frenzy begin? When HCL bought Domino, Connections and the rest of IBM Collaboration, IBM decided that they will terminate the IBM SmartCloud / Connection Cloud, which led to a solution finding quest for its customers on those platforms at the time. Where to put all those accounts?

HCL decided to choose global leaders as replacements, the first three selected being Prominic, Belsoft and ISW. The three of them united under the ThreeThirds umbrella and decided to take on this migration challenge together. Number one, because we already knew each other and, number two, because these three companies are located in US, EU, and Australia respectively,  allowing for effective coverage around the entire world. 

This collaboration has its challenges, from time slots for meetings to combining 3 different styles of work and 3 different sets of expertise in order to offer customers a unified front and globally consistent solution. 

This is how the magic happened:

• The first step was setting 2 Connections multi-tenant environments in 2 Data Centers, one in Europe one in the US. The infrastructure part was taken care of by Prominic and the Connections side by Belsoft and ISW.

• Setup Domino: Each their own, different and yet the same and with the same standards applied.

• The key element was the ability to support each other around the clock.

Communication Communities is one interesting use case. ThreeThirds had the need to collaborate with its customers. It all began as: Hi, I am a customer, I am now in the IBM cloud and I need to be migrated to your cloud. As soon as a contract was signed a Community was opened up for that customer. The purpose of the Community was communicating with the Customer and file exchange. 

Because the MT environment was not yet built the Belsoft Connections environment was used. 

Here are the requirements for these Communities:

• Accessible by all companies

• Accessible by all customers and their BP’s 

• Files

• Blogs

• To Do

• Forum

Customer Community Overview

The Connections Community was used to communicate with the customer and share info. If for instance a customer would have had Connections and mail several calls were held to explain how they will be migrated , how things will evolve in the next weeks. After the kickoff calls some files were shared with the customer through the Community Blog.

This is how the Document Sharing process went:

One very important aspect that needed to be taken cared of was the ability to collaborate not only within the three companies involved but also with external partners like HCL.

The requirements for the communities used for this purpose were:

• Accessible by all companies

• Wikis

• Files

• To Do

• Forum

• Bookmarks

These are the things that were built initially:

We used Forums for collaborating with HCL:

Here is an example on how you can organize your documentation using Connections:

Once we were able to finalize the migration we realized that the platform that was built for this endeavour needs to evolve constantly so a group of architects was assembled across the three companies that get together every two months and discuss some topics that are pre-determined. This Community is rather small, so it does not always need to be a big community with lots of sections but it gets the job done: discussing what needs to get done, determining who gets it done tracking the work, etc.

You can also access data that is not in Connections using this very tool. One example for that is our customer database, a Domino db, which needed to be accessed through a portal which is why it was integrated into Three Thirds Community multi-tenant platform.

The requirements for this were:

• Accessible by all companies

• Integration of different tools

• Files

• To Do

• Blogs

• Forum

• Bookmarks

The integration with the Domino Database which you can see in the lower part of the image offers great flexibility when you would need to change any info regarding a customer.

Since time was of great essence with the whole migration process ThreeThirds needed something to help keep all the balls in the air. We used Boards for Roadmaps since we needed transparent planning, persistent data over all companies and history and control about feature delivery. This was created on our multi-tenant platform .

We liked Boards so much and found them so effective that we decided to use them for the Migration part as well. We needed a migration overview and follow up, the ability of someone picking up where things were left off by another person on the team and an exact customer migration status.

As you might expect all this was created on our own multi-tenant platform and it was designed to be accessible by all companies, offer a visual overview and also be repetitive. 

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