Why They Migrated to Hyland Cloud
WFAA is a longtime customer of Naviant, having implemented OnBase over 15 years ago. As their organization and strategic goals evolved, they decided to move their solution to the cloud. One of their primary strategic goals was to reduce the overhead of their overall hosting environment. Craig Hughes, Applications Manager at WFAA, reflected, “We were looking to use more Platform as a Service (PASS) and Software as a Service (SAAS), and on top of reducing our hosting footprint, we wanted to use more subscription services so that we weren’t buying things and owning them for life, but could pay for subscriptions where we could add and remove things as needed.”
WFAA also wanted to reduce its overhead for upgrades. Previously, their upgrades took multiple weeks. A cloud solution could provide a simpler upgrade process with shorter cycles that take responsibility for most of the work involved. “We thought, ‘Well, let’s just put our solution in the cloud, and the updates will be done for us,” said Craig.
When deciding which cloud solution was right for them, they performed a cost-benefit analysis. They determined the first-year costs associated with the Hyland Cloud would be close to the amount they were already paying for the servers, electricity, maintenance, and overhead of their current solution. Plus, the cost-benefit analysis projected costs would decrease for the second and third years.
Beyond the potential return on investment, WFAA was drawn to the solution’s ability for easier upgrades and reducing the overhead of their overall hosting environment. And the fact that they were already using OnBase heavily impacted their decision.
"For OnBase, I know we could have moved to another cloud, but the whole idea was that Hyland knows their servers better than we do, and better than anyone else would, so that was a big reason we moved in that direction."
- Craig Hughes, Applications Manager, WFAA
The Migration Journey
The implementation in 2020 was bumpy. WFAA was one of Hyland’s first migrations of OnBase on-premise to the Hyland Cloud. It was also Naviant’s first cloud migration. As a result, there was a steep learning curve for all involved.
For example, WFAA faced issues with:
- Activating single sign-on (SSO)
- Missing files and miscalculations due to a lack of disk group visibility
- A Full-Text Search bug within Unity that took time and a software patch to resolve
- Unity Client’s installers that required them to modify their Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) files
"Going through the communications and looking back through our experience, we reached out to Naviant, Naviant reached out to Hyland, it was a lot of back and forth, which is the nature of cloud services, but a lot of the issues were growing pains, and things are mostly smooth now."
- Mickey Nguyen, Application Developer , WFAA
Additionally, WFAA had to adjust to Hyland’s servers’ occasional downtimes, which affect when they can schedule processes. They also had to become accustomed to the communication protocols of the cloud services.
Despite these roadblocks, Mickey shared, “A lot of problems got resolved by working with Naviant. I specifically remember working with Jen Siegel for reporting dashboards, which was great, also, Brianna Overkamp, special shoutout to her because she resolved a lot of the issues at hand.”
Life in the Hyland Cloud
After the tough implementation, the WFAA team reaped the benefits of the Hyland Cloud. WFAA has reached its goal of reducing overhead and hosting footprint by implementing the Hyland Cloud! The cloud has also improved its data security by adding extra data encryption.
Living in the cloud impacts the WFAA team’s daily and monthly workload. Hyland offers a test environment in the cloud. This feature has enabled WFAA to eliminate its non-production environment and the associated software and server costs. Additionally, many of the tasks that go into security, testing, and documentation are no longer WFAA’s responsibility, allowing them to focus on other important work that pushes their organization’s mission forward.
Mickey said, “After the issues were ironed out, it’s become less work for us.” He continued, “Daily, there’s less management involved, with our servers and disk groups being pushed off to the cloud.”
"For me personally, it’s made my monthly tasks quicker to go through because there’s less maintenance we have to do on our side."
- Fiona Abbott, Technology Program Specialist, WFAA
To continue to support their solution, Mickey, Fiona, and their team have taken several training classes through Naviant.
The Road Ahead
Looking toward the future, WFAA has a couple of projects on the horizon. They are preparing for their first upgrade in the cloud and plan to pursue an OnBase integration with Salesforce in the next couple years.
