Kapow Software, a leading innovator in the application integration market, today announced that it has partnered with CapTech to make migrating legacy digital assets to Microsoft SharePoint faster and more economical, without business disruptions or content freezes. With the Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform, any combination of legacy content can be systematically transformed, formatted and migrated into SharePoint 2010 to get customers up and running with 100 percent of their data.

“Businesses depend on clean, well-structured data that’s easily accessible for Web publication or enterprise search,” said Stefan Andreasen, Kapow Software founder and CTO. “However, it frequently can be a challenge to migrate the content and perform all of the necessary transformations, metadata and taxonomy on high volumes of widespread legacy Web content, as traditional migration scripts or manual cut-and-paste migrations fail to deliver on these objectives. By integrating with Microsoft SharePoint 2010, migration and content cleansing projects can deliver value in a fraction of the time and cost compared to any other method.”

Raymond James Financial, a global financial services company, recently engaged CapTech for assistance with modernizing its intranet platform and enhancing the technology processes that support approximately 5,000 U.S. financial advisors. The company’s intranet receives about two million page views per month and is the most widely used communication and knowledge-sharing vehicle for the company, servicing nearly 15,000 associates across more than 2,300 locations. The company needed to transition from a highly customized content management system to SharePoint 2010 with minimum impact to end users and content authors. CapTech and Raymond James Financial reviewed the available content migration tools, and selected Kapow Katalyst as the best solution to migrate and transform content across dissimilar platforms.

“Kapow Katalyst allowed us to both crawl the content of the Vignette system and use its database connector to capture additional metadata,” said Dennis Bowne, CapTech managing director. “By leveraging Kapow Software’s platform, we were able to automate the extraction and transformation of the content, metadata and taxonomy for the new SharePoint template, which gave our developers a huge advantage over other tools we reviewed. At the end of the day, it was either write extensive amounts of code or leverage the Kapow Katalyst platform. It allows our team to build repeatable extraction, transformation and upload visual scripts to move content from legacy systems into the new taxonomy and platform. Kapow Katalyst minimized our production content freeze period and allowed us to accelerate our timelines.”

“The migration process we developed with CapTech and Kapow Software allowed for a more streamlined approach to moving content. We were able to avoid a cumbersome manual process, which meant our content authors could focus on learning how to use the new system and making improvements for users,” said Mike White, director of marketing for Raymond James Financial. “We were able to iteratively map content from our production systems into the new content categories for our SharePoint portal, test with focus groups and subject matter experts, and repeat with changes and updates.”