As of today, most of the legacy ECM systems that are around have been in production for more than 10 years (some of them even 20). A lot of enterprise customers are focused to move to a next generation Content Services Platform.

 

Why your content migration depends on several aspects

What it is not so clear is that unstructured content migration is not trivial. There is no magic available to press a button and to have all the content moved to the new system. The content movement should be considered of course, but the metadata should be also kept in sync and all the integrations with other business systems and processes must be taken into consideration. In addition to that, there are a lot of other challenges that must be considered like exceptions, missing content in the source system, bad data or object pointers, duplicated data, corrupt content, missing metadata, etc.

To conduct a successful migration from a legacy ECM, the team must be also familiar with the old ECM system, with the new ECM system and, of course, with the content migration tool.

Introducing a new ECM system will include a new interface and a training is needed for the users. As line of business users (information workers) can often see a new application as a burden rather than an improvement, a simple user experience is critical for a fast and successful user adoption.

When migrating content, most of the time sensitive / regulated content, the compliance capabilities offered by the content migration tool but also by the target (new) system need to be considered as well. Applying the original retentions on the target system must be considered carefully (system generated values that could overwrite the original metadata is just one example). For a full chain of custody the migration needs to include the retentions, legal holds, electronic signatures and other components to maintain the content compliance in the new system.

 

5 areas that we recommend to be analyzed:

• The tool (to migrate) – multiple content sources, full chain of custody and comprehensive reporting.
• The target system (a next generation content services platform). A modern but also simple UI / UX is mandatory.
• The content infrastructure used (scalable & compliant object storage)
• The content migration methodology (proven)
• The team (skills and experience)

 

Although a challenge, there are solutions around migrating content

StarMigrator Engine is a proven tool enabling content and metadata migration out of various source ECM systems (Documentum, IBM Content Manager or CMOD, IBM FileNet, IBM TSM) to a next generation content service platform (SEAL). Additional benefits are offered when a compliant / WORM capable object storage is used – HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) being a top choice.

With StarMigrator Engine + SEAL + HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) the customers have several capabilities and benefits:

• Scheduled archiving or near real-time: the migration process can be configured to run as frequently as needed (e.g. continuously, once a minute, once every hour, daily etc.);
• Filters can be applied to decide which items to migrate (e.g.: based on document attributes – “documents of type invoice with the last update timestamp older than 7 years”);
• Transfer or set a retention time for the objects in the target system (SEAL / HCP), including adding an offset to a document timestamp attribute or the “unlimited”/”initial unspecified” retention period;
• Set hold or shred options at individual content objects;
• Migration verification method for each migrated item or for a sample of migrated items (including optional content hash verification; hash on destination side computed by HCP or computed by StarMigrator Engine);
• The content transfer is multithreading and in batch mode; Tuning parameters are available (e.g.: how many parallel transfers, the date time criteria for documents that should be transferred in one batch run, content chunk size).
• With HCP the system architecture is simplified as complex, resource-demanding infrastructure is replaced by a scalable object storage – Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) – thus saving future costs
• Both content and metadata is stored on HCP allowing external applications to use it and searches to be performed independent of the ECM availability

 

SEAL, as a next generation content services platform / target system, provides:

• Best TCO (total cost of ownership) – competitive pricing (capacity based) especially for large number of users, fast implementation, rapid user adoption, low maintenance costs;
• Best user experience – designed for business / non-IT users, focused in simplicity and productivity;
• Metadata driven platform – expanded metadata management and metadata based automation capabilities to automate ingesting, classifying and managing content metadata;
• All-in-One – designed as an content services solution to address full content management needs, including document capture, OCR, workflow, records management, life cycle and archiving
• Strong capabilities for capturing and ingesting content including scanning, “application-aware” content migration, user-created content or auto generated content;
• Easy to implement integration and connectivity capabilities with both on-premises and cloud applications through extensive APIs and interfaces and standard connectors/migrators (SAP, SharePoint, Documentum, etc.);
• Strong mobile and cloud capabilities – native mobile clients for iOS and Android, CMIS for simple integration, designed for Cloud and SaaS providers with multi-tenancy capabilities;

To find out more about Application-Aware Content Migration, StarMigrator Engine, SEAL or HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) please visit StarMigrator Engine, SEAL or contact our team at content-migration@star-storage.eu.

 

Note: this article was first published on Pulse here.