Imagine an ITSM 6 to 7 upgrade's data migration happening flawlessly, in less time and for less cost than you had thought possible.

Imagine coming in on Monday after the migration, and finding all your tickets as they were when you left, with all relationships, attachments and Work Log entries, you in a completely different set of groups, on a new application!

Imagine a heavily customized ITSM 5 with 500+ customers and 1500+ SLAs plus, Changes, Help Cases, Assets, being scripted totally by your own off-shore team in less time than you had though possible?

With Meta-Update we are pleased to offer fixed price Anything to ARS^TM Migrations.

• Even if the old or new ITSM systems are highly customized,
• Foundation or Transaction data,
• No ARS Server Changes required at all.

Meta-Update Scripts enable us to offer fixed-price migrations that include all of the value transformation rules and references needed to make proper ITSM 7 Requests.

Meta-Update Scripts are tailored for each customer. Different value lookups and transformation rules are scripted.

Values can be Looked Up from any style spread-sheet the customer may have, in addition to script lists, ARS queries, and SQL Queries including SQL functions.

Initial Consult

The Initial Consult serves as

• an introductory meeting of those involved, signing of agreements,
• a first look-see at the data in an effort to cost out the migration.

The Initial Consult allows us to develop and offer your Migration Plan for a milestone-based payment plan.

Typical efforts range from a single day with online consulting to a few days and onsite visits.

Fixed Price

What could be better than a committed price? No cost overruns! Guaranteed!

With Meta-Update, we are so confident that we can implement any data transformation and cleaning requirements, that we can offer this service at a guaranteed price.

You can never have a budget overrun. Guaranteed!

You pay based on accepted and delivered milestones. At any milestone, you can terminate the project and owe no more. You are in complete control.

Data Summary

The Data Summary phase is the first significant milestone.

It delivers documents and spreadsheets outlining the tables and structures containing data that will be migrated.

All data containing tables are listed and those chosen to be migrated will have details on number of records needing migration.

Source and Target data sets and data transformation rules are described in a general basis. Some specific custom transformations are described. An initial estimate of the computing requirements and timings is made.

Mapping Sessions

Customer selected Record Trees are brought over in advance using default value transformation rules.

For example, a series of ITSM 6, CMDB 1.1, records are selected, and they alone, with all their related records and related CIs, are brought over.

Mapping sessions are held with the source and target ARS data in view. Value changes and transformation rules are made during the session and the Refresh button is pressed on the target system ARS Client to view the results.

The Customer is encouraged to provide a list of diverse Changes, Help Desk Cases, CIs, in an effort to exercise as many of the types of relationships that will be encountered.

A further, second set of mapping sessions is held so that the full required transformations and LookUps be readied.

Selected Trees

The ability of Meta-Update to process a list of selected records, and for each such record, to process any number of query and update operations on different source and target forms, lets us take over, say 10 ITSM 6 Help Desk Cases in a few seconds.

This enables a "try it and see" approach to the mapping sessions with some changes being made in under a minute. You just press Refresh on the ITSM 7 User Tool and see the effect of your changes.

There is no other tool - except API programming - that can take over a list of selected trees and make the value, schema, record, Diary transformations and lookups required!

There is no other tool that can successfully automate a migration of a previous ITSM release into a current one.

Data Cleansing

Meta-Update has powerful features to implement data cleansing.

In ITSM 7, all fields that were previously unchecked type-in fields must be checked against other tables. Hidden, undocumented, reference fields from those other tables need to be set for the ITSM 7 workflow to function correctly.

Meta-Update can lookup source values against lists in the underlying databases, in ARS tables, in CSV files, and in SQL queries including SQL functions.

Meta-Update can also use regular expressions to split values, and supports full nested ifs in its assignments.

This enables records with say, misspelled addresses to be validated and the addresses corrected.

Meta-Update is also replete with reporting facilities to identify which source records will need transformations.

Full Migration Tests

Data Migrations are done to test environments progressively increasing the number of records migrated. Before the production migration, the complete set of data will have been migrated several times to validate scripts and assay migration performance.

From these trials, a strategy to implement the migration is drawn up.

This may range from a single job on a client machine, to a series of simultaneous jobs on an array of machines on the production migration weekend.

The test machines can be inspected by the client's staff and migration changes can be implemented.

Migration Weekend

All the data is usually migrated in under a weekend.

In cases where an extremely large volume of data must be migrated, the migrations can begin early and catch up jobs will be run on the migration weekend.

The migration weekend results in a Final Report detailing records moved, records created, records that were invalidated due to failed lookups or other errors.

Migration scripts can be run for individual record trees, lists of record trees, or SQL or ARS Queries. For each record tree, all dependent records are queried for and processed.

Post Delivery Support

Your staff alter translates and rerun request or request list specific migrations.

These records can be rerun through a list or individually after the production migration. Sufficient spare licenses are given so that these records may be investigated and translation tables added to or changed.

Your staff alter translates and rerun request or request list specific migrations.

Meta-Update support is given during this time.