Many institutions want to leave their faculty system years before they actually do.
With a decade of dossiers, committee votes, and external review letters that have to survive the move, an IT team with no spare capacity, and no quiet week in the academic calendar to do it in, the system migration is a task that many dread.
We’ve made that part simple, and it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from. Interfolio, Watermark, a system your own team built, ten years of spreadsheets—it’s the same streamlined implementation, run by someone you can actually call, from the first data export to the day you go live.
Whatever you’re on now, we’ve moved someone off it.
Faculty Experience
We never ask faculty to work in two systems.
This is the line we hold. Contracts overlap: a minor overlap is typical, and it’s usually the sane thing to do. But faculty get one system, with a hard cutover date set immediately after the final data export. Nobody enters anything twice. Nobody wonders which system is real.
That distinction—contract overlap, yes; parallel data entry, no—is the whole answer to “won’t this be chaos for faculty?” It won’t, because faculty experience exactly one change on exactly one date.
Phased Rollout
You can go live unit by unit, across the year.
Bring one school live in December and another in March with the same contract and the same personalized implementation support. Or start with a single department and expand from there, while the rest of the university takes its time.
You do not need one clean institution-wide date. Many institutions don’t have one.
Live-Cycle Flexibility
Workflows may need to change mid-cycle, and that’s ok.
A deadline slips. A reviewer recuses. A committee member goes on leave three weeks in and someone has to take their place. In most systems that’s a support ticket, a workaround, or a restarted process.
In Scholarly, dates move and reviewers change on a live cycle. Cases already in flight keep moving. Nothing resets.
This matters more than it sounds for a migration, because it means your first cycle in Scholarly doesn’t have to go perfectly to plan. You can set a deadline in September, move it in October, and not a single dossier goes back to square one.
Parallel Implementation
Run your current cycle. Start the migration anyway.
Historical data migration, integration work, and workflow configuration happen in parallel with your existing cycle in the old system, not after it. At one institution, historical import, Banner integration, workflow configuration, and pilot testing overlapped across seven months while the current cycle ran to completion where it started.
The cycle you’re in right now is not a reason to wait. It’s the thing we build around.
Frequently Asked Questions
We're in the middle of our promotion and tenure cycle right now. Should we wait?
What happens to cases already in progress at cutover?
Will faculty have to enter anything twice?
Our contract doesn't expire for eighteen months.
Do committee votes and external review letters come across?
How long does this actually take?
Can we go live one college at a time?
Can we talk to someone who's migrated off our current system?
Bring us your current system, your cycle calendar, and your renewal date. We'll tell you honestly what your migration looks like: including the parts that will be harder than you want them to be.
Already know what you want to ask a peer? Request a reference call with an institution that left your current system.
