FileCabinet CS migration options

Onvio is Thomson Reuters' cloud document product, and you do this one yourself. Your staff run it from FileCabinet CS under File, then Export to Onvio. You need permission covering Migrations, the Documents tab, and Client Documents. A tick box brings annotations across, and you can limit a run to certain folders or a date range.

How long it really takes comes down to the way the tool handles drawers and conflicts. Drawers are locked while they are being migrated, so a drawer in progress is a drawer nobody can use. You cannot start another migration until every conflict has been dealt with, and you deal with conflicts by hand in Onvio under Setup, then Migrations. And if you migrate a drawer you already migrated, Thomson Reuters says duplicate files for those clients get replaced in Onvio.

Put that together and you know what you are buying. The tool moves documents into Onvio properly, and it moves them as fast as your own staff can feed it and unblock it. Thomson Reuters' guide puts a drawer of about thirty documents at eight to ten minutes. Multiply that by your drawer count before you plan around it, and remember the queue stops dead until somebody clears the conflicts.

GoFileRoom is the other Thomson Reuters destination, and getting there is a service rather than a tool. Their Technical Services team does the loading. You sign an agreement, and Thomson Reuters says Technical Services will contact you within three business days to agree the scope and book a date.

Your firm still does real work first. You hand over encrypted backups, agree how documents get indexed with a consultant, make sure everything is checked in, and build a list matching every FileCabinet CS drawer to a GoFileRoom client number. That list is the same job any move needs, whoever does it. Somebody has to say which drawer is which client.

The limits they publish are the ones to hold everybody else to. Thomson Reuters loads at most 30,000 documents a night, and says eight weeks is typical for the whole job from the day it gets your data. It will not move archived documents. It keeps your original data for 60 days after it hands your firm a report reconciling the count.

That last part is the one to remember. The company that wrote the file format finishes by proving the count. If somebody else will not do the same, they are asking you to take it on trust.

This is the only route with no subscription at the end of it, and on a small cabinet it is a fair afternoon's work. You export with File, then Send to, then File, and the files land on a drive you own.

The cost is not the export. Thomson Reuters says the files that come out do not keep your folder structure, and that keeping documents split up by folder means a separate export for every folder. So it is not one export. It is one export per folder, or one flat pile somebody then sorts into clients and years by hand.

Do the sums on your own cabinet before you commit. Count your drawers. Work out how many minutes one client takes somebody who has to open documents to work out whose they are. Multiply. If it comes to a week, take the afternoon. If it comes to two months of somebody's time, you are not choosing between paying and not paying. You are choosing between paying somebody else and paying your own staff.

We are the fourth row, and we are not a filing system. We run the export with you, work out which drawer is which client, and file every document under the client and the year. Anything we are not sure about goes on a list for you to decide, instead of being guessed into a folder.

We check what we deliver against your drawer and contents reports, file by file, and you sign off on a count rather than on our word. Thomson Reuters holds its own service to that. There is no reason to do it to a lower standard.

Where the files live afterwards is up to you. Take the sorted folders onto a drive you own and pay nobody anything, or keep them in LedgerBox next to your client portal. We do not have to be the destination to do the work.