Smokeball

This means Smokeball typically runs as a desktop app on employees' PCs that store data in cloud-based databases and APIs that are run by Smokeball.

General practice management systems store a wide variety of data instrumental to running many kinds of law firms.

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In Smokeball's backend, documents often have illegible file names like "1357219.pdf". Universal Migrator will automatically humanize these names to familiar ones, like "Motion for Private Process.pdf", ensuring firm members see the same human-readable names post-migration as they do when viewing documents directly through Smokeball.

The Migration Specialist will need an Administrator username and password into Smokeball in order to extract your data.

Because data is extracted from Smokeball via the internet, the migration can be run from any suitable location.

A member of the firm will need to complete a small spreadsheet mapping users from Smokeball to users in the new system.

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The Migration Specialist is the person who will be performing this migration. They may be a member of Universal Migrator's own Internal Migration Team or any IT professional who has completed the Universal Consultant training program.

The Firm Administrator is a member of the law firm who can serve as a dedicated point of contact, make decisions, and answer any questions the Migration Consultant may have. This person should be readily available and is typically the managing partner or office manager of the firm.

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triConvey and Smokeball are the same product distributed under different names.

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With certain vendors, submitting a Notice of Termination/Non-Renewal can prompt a shift in cooperation: some will restrict or revoke export and backup capabilities, or limit the volume of data you're able to download, making migration more difficult.
To guard against this, best practice with any vendor, including Smokeball, is to withhold notice until you've been fully live on your new system for at least 30 days. In practice, this means your migration should be complete approximately 45 days before your notice deadline.

Many consultants have reported experiencing disruptions when attempting to back up data from Smokeball. These disruptions can take various forms, including disabled user accounts, throttled download speeds, blocked IP addresses, and other unexpected obstacles.
Plan for delays you can't fully anticipate.

Many firms migrating from Smokeball have reported that Smokeball offered them a paid backup of their data and then discovered the backup was delivered in a proprietary format, omitted key data, and was not suitable for use in a migration. We recommend declining this option and instead using the Universal Migrator software to acquire your data.