TSG has recently been working with multiple clients who are considering whether to deploy their Content Management platform in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud instead of on premise. The discussion typically boils down to “how much would it cost for me to deploy this in the cloud vs procuring hardware and software licenses?” This post will provide a reference architecture and sizing estimate to help understand the various components and their relative costs to procure, support, and maintain ... [Continue Reading]
Google Cloud with BigTable for Content Management – Reference Architecture & Cost Estimate
TSG has recently been working on validating its HBase implementation of OpenContent Management Suite against the Google Cloud BigTable NoSQL database. This post is going to provide some details on how the architecture of BigTable works with OpenContent, as well as help with the sizing of the Google Cloud infrastructure for a typical instance. ... [Continue Reading]
Reference Architecture for Content Management on Azure HDInsight with HBase
TSG has recently been working with a multiple clients that are deciding on whether to deploy their Content Management platform in the Azure cloud from Microsoft or on premise. The discussion typically boils down to "how much would it cost for me to deploy this in the cloud vs procuring hardware and software licenses for an on premise deployment?" This post will provide a reference architecture and sizing estimate to help understand the various components and their relative costs to procure, ... [Continue Reading]
ECM 2.0 – Cloud for Metadata and On Premise Document/Object Storage
We have recently had some interesting discussions with clients in regards to storage of documents and objects on premise with cloud options for the meta-data. One of the advantages of the TSG solutions is that we can support a variety of alternatives for both on premise as well as cloud based document and object storage. This post will discuss the various alternatives. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum SAAS – Look Before you Leap
TSG recently completed the movement from an onsite Documentum installation to Documentum in the OpenText cloud for one of our long-time clients in a highly regulated industry. The client had considered Documentum SAAS from Dell VMWare cloud back when VMWare was part of EMC. This also wasn't the newly announced OpenText partnership with Google or the SAAS Documentum LEAP product set but a more traditional movement of existing applications (Webtop, Documentum Server) to dedicated servers in ... [Continue Reading]
DynamoDB Benchmark – Building an 11 Billion Document DR Process
In June, 2019, Technology Services Group completed an unprecedented 11 billion document benchmark leveraging Amazon Web Services and specifically DynamoDB and Elasticsearch. As with any of our enterprise class solutions, we didn't view the benchmark as complete without a disaster recovery process in place. This post will share our architecture approach and lessons learned from implementing DR for the benchmark. ... [Continue Reading]
DynamoDB 11 Billion Benchmark 11 Thousand Concurrent Users Success!!! – Lessons Learned
TSG initiated our 11 Billion benchmark on Friday, May 10th. As of today we have completed the fourth and final phase, testing our repository with 11,000 concurrent users. This post will share the results. ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet Migration to Amazon Web Services – Why now more than ever?
TSG is currently finalizing a case study on a client that has successfully moved from an legacy on-premise FileNet system to Amazon Web Services. In preparation for that piece coming out in the next two weeks, we thought we would write some of our thoughts on why so many clients, after years of delaying migration efforts, are finally moving off of FileNet to Amazon Web Services. ... [Continue Reading]
Redaction for AWS, Alfresco, Documentum and Hadoop – Bulk Redaction upon Ingestion or Migration
As we presented in our Redaction Roadmap earlier this year, one of our product development additions to OpenMigrate this quarter is the ability to bulk redact incoming documents as part of an ingestion or migration into Alfresco, Documentum, AWS, or Hadoop. As detailed earlier in our Redacting Roadmap, both OpenMigrate and the OpenContent Management Suite will have capabilities surrounding the redaction of specific values. This post will focus on demonstrating how OpenMigrate can be used to ... [Continue Reading]
DocFinity – Migrating to Amazon S3
TSG is currently working with an insurance client migrating from DocFinity to the Amazon cloud. This post will describe how TSG is assisting the client move to a more modern solution with Amazon Web Services and specifically Amazon S3 leveraging our OpenMigrate migration framework. ... [Continue Reading]
Redacting Roadmap – User Scenarios
As part of the TSG Product Roadmap and based on clients requests, we are currently in the midst of adding additional redaction capabilities across our product set. This post will discuss the different user redaction scenarios and how our products (OpenAnnotate, OpenMigrate and the OpenContent Search and Case) are being updated to satisfy these requests. These capabilities are being added for Alfresco, Documentum, Hadoop and potentially Amazon DynamoDB as supported repositories. Other ... [Continue Reading]
Content Services and the Cloud: On-Premises vs. Cloud vs. Hybrid Approach – Document Strategy Guest Contributor
When posed with the question “Are you considering on-premise, cloud or a hybrid approach for your content services?”, most practical decision makers who are looking to gradually and safely move away from the high costs of a on-premise data center and legacy ECM solution will respond with a hybrid approach. But is a hybrid approach the same thing as hybrid software that the ECM vendors are offering? In this article for Document Strategies, TSG discusses the differences between on-premise, cloud ... [Continue Reading]
Doculabs Upgrades Alfresco – Recent Review
Lane Severson, a leading content management analyst for Doculabs, a Chicago based content management analyst firm, recently posted an updated review on Alfresco. TSG has worked with Doculabs since our founding 22 years ago and more recently with Lane as a keynote at our client briefing as well as on multiple client engagements. This post will present our thoughts on the Alfresco review. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco and AWS – 20 Security Tips
Securing Alfresco in the cloud has always been a major concern of clients moving from on premise to the cloud. The majority of our newer Alfresco clients are implementing with a solution for the cloud either on Amazon or Azure. This whitepaper will present 20 tips for securing Alfresco on Amazon Web Services (AWS). ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco Solutions of the Year 2017 – TSG wins Alfresco award for sixth year in a row
Chicago, IL. – April 4, 2018 – Technology Services Group, Inc. (TSG) the leading provider of content management solutions and services for the Fortune 1000, announced today the recognition of both the OpenContent Management Suite and OpenMigrate as Alfresco’s 2017 Solutions of the Year for the Americas. TSG was recognized for both products as they have been critical components in multiple successful large client implementations of Alfresco, particularly in the insurance and manufacturing ... [Continue Reading]
Alan Pelz-Sharpe – Deep Analysis Review of Technology Services Group
At the beginning of 2018, TSG hired Alan Pelz-Sharpe of Deep Analysis to conduct a review of TSG’s products and services. Alan both visited the TSG office as well as interviewed multiple customers and partners to better understand TSG’s offerings. This post will present his findings. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco on AWS – Achieving High Availability
Several of our clients have moved from running on-premise systems to the Amazon Web Services cloud. One of the most significant benefits with AWS in regards to high availability can be found by leveraging database high availability with AWS’ Relational Database Service (RDS) and file system high availability with AWS S3 or EFS (Elastic File System). This post will describe how to achieve a high availability architecture for Alfresco solutions. ... [Continue Reading]
2018 Thoughts and Predictions as well as recap of 2017 postings
2017 was the busiest year ever for the TSG blog. Whether it was the finalization of the purchase of Documentum by OpenText or Gartner’s 180 on IBM, we had our most active year with over 60,000 views of our different articles. This post will highlight some of the most popular articles as well as our predictions for 2018. ... [Continue Reading]
OpenAnnotate – Beta Availability as a service on Amazon Web Services
We often receive requests from integrators or ECM customers that are looking for a way to add OpenAnnotate to their existing ECM infrastructure. For many Documentum or Alfresco deployments, OpenAnnotate can easily be added into their current infrastructures. To address clients that are not on Documentum or Alfresco, or are looking to augment their existing ECM with annotation in the cloud, we have developed OpenAnnotate as a service with Amazon Web Services. This post will detail the ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco & AWS – Modernizing Records Management – Case Study from the Department of the Navy
This week Alfresco released a case study and whitepaper highlighting the process efficiency and cost savings for modernization of the Department of the Navy's records management program. Using AWS and Alfresco, the DON TRACKER solution retired 20 separate systems and delivered a solutions responding to the Managing Government Records Directive from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In addition to the case study, the ... [Continue Reading]
ECM Roadmap – Thoughts on Planning for the Future
TSG was part of a presentation on at the Document Strategy Conference two weeks ago. One of the follow-up items was our thoughts on an ECM Roadmap. Tied to our earlier post on upcoming ECM disruptions, this post will present our initial thoughts on defining a roadmap and approach for modernizing an ECM System. ... [Continue Reading]
Modern Insurance Platforms For Claims Documentation
TSG is partnering with Alfresco and Claimwire to host a morning event on May 4th entitled Modern Insurance Platforms for Claim Documentation. The teaser video below gives a short tour of some of the functionality that will be discussed. Be sure to check out the event overview for more information on the event. ... [Continue Reading]
Claims Documentation – Modernizing Insurance Platforms
TSG is partnering with Alfresco and Claimwire to host a morning event on May 4th entitled Modern Insurance Platforms for Claim Documentation. Compared to our first 15 years of our ECM practice when Life Sciences and other compliance applications like manufacturing and plant operations drove most of the innovation in the ECM space, we have been seeing an uptick in financial services over the last 5 years and particularly claims management for the Insurance industry. This post will highlight ... [Continue Reading]
Box and ECM – What is Box missing?
Box and other Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) tools have been very successful filling the next generation document collaboration needs. Like SharePoint before it, Box and other tools, while being great at sharing files, being successful in collaboration doesn't necessarily lead to success in ECM. Back in December of 2016, we wrote an article on 9 market reasons Box would never be a serious ECM alternative For this post, rather than market thoughts, we will share our experience with ... [Continue Reading]
2017 ECM Thoughts and Predictions as well as recap of 2016 postings
With the beginning of 2017, it is time for our annual thoughts from our blog from 2016 as well as the ECM industry in general. Biggest news of the year – Dell purchases EMC, OpenText purchases Documentum from Dell Clearly the biggest news of the year for our readers was the purchase by Dell of EMC and then the sale by EMC of ECD (Enterprise Content Division that includes Documentum) to OpenText. Our most popular post of the year was Documentum sold to OpenText – Detailed Analysis and ... [Continue Reading]