As we’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, we often meet with potential clients who are interested in using OpenMigrate to meet a migration need but they haven’t yet identified specific migration requirements beyond the need to move documents from one location to another. It is important to identify requirements and an overall migration strategy as early as possible as migrations provide a great opportunity to “clean up” content management systems. This “cleansing” can be through object model updates, metadata cleansing, deletion or archival of obsolete documents, or other business related decisions.
Author: nickiemc
Documentum Migration – “Two-Step” Bulk Load versus a “One-Step” Migration Approach
Recently, we have seen an uptick in the number of requests for OpenMigrate support for migrating from Documentum to either another Documentum repository or a new repository like Alfresco or M-Files. Many times clients will opt to use a vendor supplied bulk upload tool as part of the migration and use OpenMigrate simply to dump the files from Documentum to a file system. This “two-step” approach doesn’t leverage the full ability of OpenMigrate to complete the migration in one step. For this post, we will discuss benefits of the one step approach as well as issues with typical bulk load utilities.
Documentum and Alfresco Migrations – Why the Migration Tool is Only Part of the Equation
As the developers of OpenMigrate, we are always amazed by how often a new tool is unveiled that claims to make migrations considerably easier. While we love what we have done with OpenMigrate, we also typically have to educate clients that a migration tool, just like other tools, is only part of the effort. This post will touch on all of the other requirements of a migration effort beyond just moving documents from point A to point B quickly.
Document Migrations – What do you need to know?
When we first meet with clients who are interested in using OpenMigrate to meet a migration need, they typically know that they need to move documents from one system to another, but many times they haven’t yet identified all of the specific migration requirements. Determining and discussing this information as early as possible is helpful to minimize the migration effort and ensure that the documents are migrated in a way that makes them useable and accessible to the appropriate users.
TSG Gives Back!
For the past year, TSG employees have been helping pack sack lunches for residents of the Lincoln Park Community Shelter. LPCS is a social service agency that provides transitional housing, meals and other social services to men and women who are experiencing homelessness. This opportunity benefits not only the residents of LPCS but TSG as well, and TSG is proud to be able to support such a great organization!
OpenMigrate: Making Complex Migrations Simple
Past blog posts have touted the flexible, extensible and configurable nature of TSG’s open source migration tool, OpenMigrate. These claims are currently being put to the test.
TSG is in the final stages of a complex, cross-Atlantic migration utilizing OpenMigrate. This project requires moving approximately 40,000 documents from a Qumas DocCompliance system in the Midwest to an existing Qumas DocCompliance system in Europe. Qumas DocCompliance is a content management system which sits on top of Documentum and adds an additional layer of application specific objects. As a result, an extra 300,000 plus supporting objects need to be migrated as part of the document migration.
Despite the added complexity of the Qumas system, minimal effort has been required to configure OpenMigrate for the migration. Configurations were simply created for the documents and each of the 15 Qumas objects to be migrated. The configurations utilize OpenMigrate’s customizable Listener classes, which can be inserted during any step of the migration to manipulate data as required. Qumas objects rely heavily on attributes which point to other Qumas objects. Through the use of a translating Listener, these attributes are updated to point to the new objects in the target repository and the application continues to function as required. Using OpenMigrate’s multi-threading capabilities, test migrations have moved thousands of objects across the ocean in less than a minute, making the migration not only simple but fast as well.
For more information on OpenMigrate, please visit the TSG website.
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