Kirk Liemohn is a Principal Software Engineer at ThreeWill. He has spent nearly a decade helping clients transform and migrate their content from one platform to another (typically to Microsoft 365) with a focus on the more complex scenarios. Prior to his transformation focus, Kirk led several key SharePoint integrations at ThreeWill including Jive, Polycom, and Confluence.
Back in 2017, Aurea acquired Jive Software. In the months and years that followed, it became apparent that Jive was no longer innovating. If you are still one of those companies that are holding onto Jive, you may have noticed (as many of our clients are telling us) that Jive is increasing the annual license cost dramatically. In addition, we are hearing that some (all?) renewals require a 3-year contract. That is no bueno!
We have been helping clients migrate off Jive since 2014, so we know a thing or two about what it takes to do a migration from Jive to Microsoft 365. Some of the high-level steps include:
- Inventory
- Planning
- Communication & Change Management
- Migration
- Archive
All of this takes time. That planning step is where we work with our clients to determine what is migrated and where it goes (what we call Place and Content Rationalization) and where we create a wave plan to figure out the migration timing. All of this informs what you communicate to your audience (everyone that uses Jive today).
But sometimes a shortcut is in order and there just isn’t enough time to do all of those steps completely. One shortcut is to circumvent some of the planning processes and just come up with a pattern of what SharePoint site names to use based on Jive places and just migrate everything. This can be useful if you have a lot of Jive places, but not a lot of content.
Another shortcut that tends to have a much bigger impact on the schedule and budget is to limit the amount of content migrated by choosing to migrate only Jive places that have activity in the last year or two (or three). That may involve migrating old content from active Jive places. Alternatively, for most places, you may want to only migrate content that has been updated or commented on recently. That way you avoid old content altogether. These approaches may not save you time during planning but can save you a lot of time during the actual migration.
The most drastic shortcut is to perform an extract only – at least initially. In our process, this skips most steps and goes straight to Archive. We extract all the Jive content into a Technical Archive which we can hand you in a matter of weeks.
With an Extract approach, your Jive license can expire in the near term, but we can pull all of that information out before the license expires. The downside of this approach is that it requires your user base to be without direct access to their content, at least for a period of time. The archive will include content from Jive places that only some people have access to such as private and secret groups, so you can’t make this archive accessible to your entire user community. In addition, it is a “technical” archive that requires technical skills to access the content. We train you on how to access it.
The good news with this approach is that we can take this archive and migrate it to Microsoft 365 at a later date – even after your Jive license has expired.
To hear more about a Jive data extraction, check out this podcast: No Time for a Jive Migration? Try a Data Extraction – ThreeWill.
You can read more about our Jive Migration service here: Jive Migrations – ThreeWill.
Contact ThreeWill To Begin Your Jive Migration Today!