• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
TSB Alfresco Cobrand White tagline

Technology Services Group

  • Home
  • Products
    • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
    • OpenContent Search
    • OpenContent Case
    • OpenContent Forms
    • OpenMigrate
    • OpenContent Web Services
    • OpenCapture
    • OpenOverlay
  • Solutions
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Claims Management
      • Claims Demo Series
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Policy & Procedure Management
      • Compliance Demo Series
    • OpenContent Accounts Payable
    • OpenContent Contract Management
    • OpenContent Batch Records
    • OpenContent Government
    • OpenContent Corporate Forms
    • OpenContent Construction Management
    • OpenContent Digital Archive
    • OpenContent Human Resources
    • OpenContent Patient Records
  • Platforms
    • Alfresco Consulting
      • Alfresco Case Study – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Philharmonic
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Society for Clinical Pathology
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Association of Insurance Services
      • Alfresco Case Study – United Cerebral Palsy
    • HBase
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenText & Documentum Consulting
      • Upgrades – A Well Documented Approach
      • Life Science Solutions
        • Life Sciences Project Sampling
    • Veeva Consulting
    • Ephesoft
    • Workshare
  • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • 11 Billion Document Migration
    • Learning Zone
    • Digital Asset Collection – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
    • Digital Archive and Retrieval – ASCP
    • Digital Archives – New York Philharmonic
    • Insurance Claim Processing – New York Property Insurance
    • Policy Forms Management with Machine Learning – AAIS
    • Liferay and Alfresco Portal – United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago
  • About
    • Contact Us
  • Blog

Migrating From FileNet to Documentum: Could OpenMigrate Possibly Do That?

OpenMigrate can be used to migrate large volumes of images and other files from FileNet IDM into Documentum, Alfresco or any other repository. Rather than writing a full FileNet connector, TSG leveraged its JDBC and other existing framework components to quickly extend OpenMigrate to extract from FileNet.

You are here: Home / Alfresco / Migrating From FileNet to Documentum: Could OpenMigrate Possibly Do That?

February 9, 2010

Frequent readers of the TSG Blog know OpenMigrate is our flexible open source migration framework; that it can be configured or extended to move content and data between different types of repositories; and that it’s been used in numerous successful migrations with Documentum, Alfresco, Qumas, Hummingbird and many others.

But perhaps you’re wondering: “There’s no way it could migrate from an old FileNet IDM system, could it?  I mean, that system was built for old optical disk storage devices!  I heard there was a C API but that people had mixed results trying to use it for high-volume use cases.  It’s practically older than Java and the web; and certainly much older than web services.  Surely you’ll tell me it can’t be done?”

Well, I’m happy to report that TSG has two successful FileNet IDM migrations under our belts, both using OpenMigrate.  For the first, we migrated 1M files and data and made minor customizations to the framework; for the second, we migrated just over 2M, and ran OpenMigrate out of the box.

Migration Features

Some features of both migrations include:

  1. Selection of documents and their metadata using specific rules for each FileNet document class
  2. For picklists (FileNet menus): inclusion of codes, descriptions or both
  3. Translations of FileNet dates
  4. Concatenation of multi-page image files into single PDF files
  5. Binary concatenation of very large files (e.g., SAP Archive files)
  6. Migrations executed in “platter order,” in order to minimize optical disk swapping
  7. Two migration phases: a “pre-cutover” bulk migration in the weeks prior to cutover; and a final “delta” migration extracting the remaining documents and metadata
  8. Robust error recovery

In both instances, we executed OpenMigrate with 6 threads during business hours and 15 threads overnight in order to minimize the impact to interactive users.

Technical Approach

After studying the underlying FileNet database structure and the system tools available for retrieving content, TSG determined the most cost-effective approach for implementing a migration from FileNet.  Rather than attempting to integrate the Java-based OpenMigrate with the dated C API, we configured OpenMigrate to query the underlying database tables directly.  And to retrieve the content, we used a few key system tools installed on the FileNet server, scripted and controlled by a single OpenMigrate component.

The details….

  1. The JDBC Queue Populator builds the migration’s “To-Do List” from FileNet’s underlying DOCTABA table (joining against the menu item table if appropriate for the doc classes being migrated).  It includes built-in and business metadata in the query.
  2. Each OpenMigrate Source thread uses the FileNetCsmContentLoader component to retrieve the document from FileNet.  It uses a variety of FileNet system tools to extract the image or images, determines whether to concatenate the images using iText, and translates FileNet dates to Java dates.
  3. The Mapping layer performs any metadata translation in order to prepare the document for import into the target system (e.g., set the r_object_type in Documentum based on the FileNet doc class).
  4. The Target threads write the content and its metadata to the target repository.

The resulting migration approach ended up being refreshingly straightforward and repeatable; as I noted above, our second migration was able to use the custom component out of the box.

Filed Under: Alfresco, D6, D6.5, Document Control, FileNet, OpenMigrate, Upgrades

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Thomas says

    January 22, 2013 at 9:49 am

    Did you manage to do this?
    I’m trying to Migrate from Filenet IS 4.1.2 with EMC Centera to EMC Centera only and can’t find any information regarding the SAP content repository in Filenet (we were using ACSAP).
    We do need CLIPID, SAPDOCID, BARCODE, MIMETYPE and ContentRep. from Filenet for the new ContenServer to work. Only ContentRep. is missing…

    Can anyone help?

    Reply
    • Nickie Mc says

      January 29, 2013 at 10:07 am

      Thomas, unfortunately we don’t know all of the specific architecture details of Filenet, but if you can determine the appropriate database table(s) to query to get the ContentRep data, OpenMigrate could potentially be a viable solution.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • TSG Open Source Product Plans
  • Documentum Migrations – Interview with OpenMigrate Product Manager
  • Documentum 6.5 Upgrade – Character Encoding Issues
  • Migrating From Documentum with OpenMigrate: Best Practices
  • Documentum – Top 12 Tips
  • Documentum Implementations – "Over Customized" or "Over Sold"
  • Documentum and Momentum EMC World 2010 Recap
  • Documentum Full Text Search with Lucene – Honoring ACL Security
  • Documentum – What’s Next Updated for 2010
  • Documentum Search – Lucene, FAST, Verity, Google and upcoming DSS

Recent Posts

  • Alfresco Content Accelerator and Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Improving User Collaboration Efficiency
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Document Notification Distribution Lists
  • Alfresco Webinar – Productivity Anywhere: How modern claim and policy document processing can help the new work-from-home normal succeed
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Collaboration Enhancements
stacks-of-paper

11 BILLION DOCUMENT
BENCHMARK
OVERVIEW

Learn how TSG was able to leverage DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch & AWS to successfully migrate 11 Billion documents.

Download White Paper

Footer

Search

Contact

22 West Washington St
5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60602

inquiry@tsgrp.com

312.372.7777

Copyright © 2023 · Technology Services Group, Inc. · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept this site's cookies, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy ACCEPT | Cookie settings
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT