Migrations

Move applications, documents and metadata securely to new ECM systems.

Over the years, in many organizations a whole zoo of ECM systems came into existence. The reasons are manifold, may be that mergers and acquisitions brought new companies and systems, may be that departments and subsidiaries operated their own systems. The negative effects and disadvantages are clear: Although it would be possible to access several systems with applications based on OpenWorkdesk, the data and documents still exist in disparate locations and effort is needed to get consolidated views. Moreover, of course there are the administration efforts and maintenance costs that are way too high since they occur for each system. Therefore, it often is a good idea to consolidate several systems to a central platform.

Nevertheless, sometimes consolidation alone is not sufficient. It may be necessary to move one or several existing ECM systems to a completely new one. Many organizations are forced to migrate since either the software they are running or the hardware or even both are at the end of their lives and not supported anymore. Furthermore, new requirements with respect to functionality, performance, usability, security, data volume, and distributed access, which cannot be met with the old system, are drivers for a migration to a new one. Last but not least it may simply become cheaper to operate and maintain a new system with a new licensing model that better fits to the organization’s need than sticking to the old systems.

Of course, migrating documents and data from an old ECM system to a new one is not as easy as copying some data from an old to a new hard disk. There are many points to be considered and many questions have to be answered. Possibly not all documents have to be migrated and some can be left on the old system and discarded. Therefore, the documents that should be migrated have to be defined. Since these documents are very important, one has to take several measures in order to assure the reliability of the migration process and obey document security. Furthermore, the documents have to be verified and their authenticity has to be guaranteed. In many cases it may be wise to convert documents into new file formats, e.g. from TIFF to PDF/A in the course of the migration. Besides the documents, also metadata and access rights have to be migrated. Therefore, both of them have to be retrieved from the old system and in many cases from databases as well and converted to structures that fit to the new system. Finally, documents, authenticity information, metadata and access rights have to be written to the new system and the respective documents have to be flagged as migrated in the old system only after successful migration. Above all the downtimes of the systems have to be kept as short as possible and continuous operation has to be ensured.

WeWebU can assist you in your next migration project – that will come sooner or later – in several aspects.

• Our experienced consultants will define a migration strategy based on your requirements, document volume as well as source and target ECM system.
• In the project, a set of tools, proofed in many successful migration projects, ensures the smooth, performant and secure execution of the defined strategy.
• Before, during and after the migration applications based on OpenWorkdesk can provide access to documents from both the old and the new ECM system from a unified working environment and ensure continuous operation.