Essentia Professional Services: Migration & Customization

Essentia fully supports our customers in their initiatives around Open Source Communities, Online Customer Experience, Rich Internet and OnDemand. Our commitment is to provide total solutions that meet our customer’s exact needs. We strive to strike the right balance between process and innovation so that customers get the quality they need without sacrificing the productivity they demand. We manage relationships from a long-term perspective to achieve high levels of effectiveness and efficiencies to our clients.

We maintain fully functional, highly scalable on-site, off-site and off-shore facilities and Global360 practices to optimize for a best-fit delivery model. This environment enables very efficient off-shore project execution with nearly the same speed and quality as on-site execution and at a significant cost savings to our clients. The Global360 approach virtually integrates our clients and Essentia tightly in our platform in order to ensure full transparency of all project elements such as project documentation, check-ins, lifecycle issues and metrics. These elements are very useful in problem resolution discussions occurring real time. We serve as the customer’s extended team and help them deliver and support a world-class solution including strategy, transition planning, feature extensions and customization, migration, branding, content creation, testing, community ramp up, hosting, support, production engineering, maintenance and upgrades.



Migration Services

Essentia will migrate all the data in the legacy environment to the new Essentia environment in production. Data will be synchronized between the two systems and Essentia will use best efforts to ensure that there is no loss of user data or inconsistencies between the two systems. Development engineers, testers, migration tools engineers, production operations engineers & product managers will work closely with the Customer Community Managers to plan and execute the migration. Essentia will analyze the data and usage on the legacy site and deliverables from this analysis will include a detailed review of the characteristics of the customer’s data held in the various platforms and tools. Based on this analysis, a comprehensive migration methodology will be developed to handle the data sets. This will involve development of tools to automate the handling of large data sets as well as manual steps for the smaller or infrequently used data. Essentia will use snapshots of all the data currently available for testing the migration methodology. The migrated data will be periodically available for customer review on the stage boxes during the later development cycles. Essentia ESP will be installed, configured and deployed for production use. The production installation will be rigorously tested to ensure proper migration and detailed confirmation reports will be provided. Essentia will continue to engage closely with the community managers to handle any post- migration issues.



Customization Services

Essentia with its proven Global360 practices provides deep domain knowledge and expertise that our customers can leverage to obtain the exact solution they need at reasonable cost. Our ‘open-code’ model allows our partners to continuously participate in all aspects of the development process. It is not uncommon for our partners to define the use cases & user experience for specific functionality that is developed jointly on a customer branch of the code. Essentia then takes over all production, maintenance, enhancements and support of these features.

We provide a variety of services that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of the our customer. Typical services executed by Essentia are listed below. We invite you to contact us to discuss your specific requirements.

• Planning, Training & Facilitation Services – Hands-on organization and best practice demonstration for users, projects, workspaces, content and site management and administration by experts

• Site Release Management – Custom site release facilitation, group training & launch preparation

• Custom Branding – Developing a unique brand identity for your forge, messages, legal, copyright notices, style sheet, experience and ensuring consistent application across the site

• Single Sign-on Integration – Connect to your LDAP/authentication system for single sign-on

• Custom Reporting – Develop tailor-made reports and/or integrate into your reporting system

• Custom Search Integration – Connect your community to your existing third-party Search appliance