Update on OpenMigrate Qumas Migration

I posted an article a few months ago on TSG’s migration to Qumas using OpenMigrate (OpenMigrate Supports Qumas). We have now successfully run the migration through QA and are prepping for the production migration in a few weeks. I’m happy to report that the QA (Test) run executed successfully and smoothly (smooth is sometimes more difficult than successful!). The Qumas software adds hundreds of other Qumas-specific objects & tables that need to be analyzed for impacts when performing the migration. I would like to share a few lessons that we learned. These lessons really apply to any migration:

•  Don’t underestimate the mapping effort when moving to a new object model. This migration also involved mapping old content into a new model. The assumption going in was that the mapping could all be done programmatically. This was incorrect and tens of thousands of documents needed to be manually mapped. Mapping and the management of the data mapping took a significant amount of effort
• Do not underestimate the complexity of working with a new object model/database structure. As stated above, Qumas adds hundreds of tables on top of the Documentum structure. On our test runs in a sandbox environment every time we thought we had the dependencies figured out, something unexpected popped up and back we went to the database to understand the inter-dependencies.
• Perform a full test run whenever possible. Many scenarios are not uncovered when only mapping a subset of the data. I would highly recommend performing a full migration in development. We did follow this advice and I believe this was key to a successful (and smooth) run through QA/Test.
• Open Migrate is extremely versatile! After the table dependencies and all impacted data fields were figured out, we were able to perform this migration with minimal updates to OpenMigrate. Updates to OpenMigrate included extending the product to support a translator or Rosetta look-up table and support for calling the Qumas auto-number table.  After using OpenMigrate to do migrations to/from FirstDoc and now Qumas I’m convinced it would work well with any ECM solution or add on component.

Happy Migrating!