Alfresco Content Migrations – An OpenMigrate Update

TSG has been continually making updates to our Alfresco Target for the OpenMigrate platform.  When it comes to migrations from other repositories or a reworking of metadata and business rules, OpenMigrate has been a key platform in managing complex migrations.  We’ve made a number of updates to better understand bottlenecks and performance, and to make sure that all use cases are covered in regards to migrating all attribute types, aspects, content types, folders, and versions.

Since the original Alfresco webinar last year showcasing the migration of content from SharePoint 2003 to Alfresco, we’ve has success migrating content out of a number of ECM repositories, including FileNET , Documentum, SharePoint 2007, Stellent, and of course your traditional file system.  More often than not, our JDBC connector provides the primary means in which you can access the underlying content of a legacy ECM repository, extract the metadata and content, and migrate to the target repository.

We’ve also successfully migrated content into Alfresco EC2 instances.  Our most recent migration included migrating over 300GB of content into an Alfresco repository in the Cloud.  When moving this much content, it may make sense to utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) Import/Export—ship a portable storage device over to Amazon to be loaded into Amazon S3.  OpenMigrate can then load the content into the Alfresco repository on the cloud.  FedEx will beat low bandwidth every time!

Alfresco has been great in providing suggestions and comments on how to further increase migration performance.  In the coming months, we will be looking to integrate concepts from Peter Monk’s work with the Alfresco Bulk Filesystem Import.