I was recently at a client struggling with an ECM decision (Alfresco or Documentum) based on connectivity to a scanning data capture solution. Normally the ECM requirement will drive the scanning solution.  For this client, capture of data from the image was the driving business justification.  After all data was extracted, the client wanted to save the image into an ECM solution with links to payroll and billing.

One of our technical architects just released a great paper on how to leverage OpenMigrate, our Migration tool for bulk ingestion (document and meta-data) into either Documentum or Alfresco as an ongoing process. 

Open Migrate for Enterprise Capture Whitepaper 

In dealing with Capture options (typically we see InputAccel or Kofax), the connectivity to the back-end ECM can be an issue.  By leveraging an Open Source solution like OpenMigrate, clients have the benefit of keeping the Capture and ECM solutions isolated while providing multiple methods to ingest content.

Some highlights of this approach versus the typical vendor export:

• True stand-alone, unattended operation. OpenMigrate is not a Windows client application requiring a module login. Issues with the Export module losing its connection and a system administrator having to re-launch and re-login are removed from the process.
• Multi-threaded operation allows for faster document loading. More documents can be processed at once without having to license and setup additional Export modules from the Enterprise Capture vendor.
• Increased error handling ability and logging functionality. Many clients find export modules to be too much of a black box – when things go wrong it is difficult to determine why and re-process without re-processing an entire batch. Detailed logging as well as rollback and re-processing capabilities are available with OpenMigrate to make sure capture flows complete as intended.
• Native connections to target repositories ensure architecture components are not bypassed with OpenMigrate.

For one of our clients, the ability to leverage one tool for ongoing as well as one-time migration allowed them simplify their administration of the overall system.  To learn more about OpenMigrate – click here.