Ephesoft Export to Documentum Using OpenMigrate

Recently a client came to us with a need to export documents and metadata captured using Ephesoft into Documentum.  We’ve seen many clients implement Ephesoft as a capture solution for Alfresco, but had yet to see anyone export into Documentum.  This post will discuss how OpenMigrate provides a configurable bridge between Documentum and Ephesoft.

Having recently become an Ephesoft partner, we thought it would be a good test of the configurability of OpenMigrate to see if this integration could be implemented without any coding.  First a little background… Ephesoft is an open source platform for document capture, OCR, indexing, etc.  See our previous post for more information on Ephesoft.

Ephesoft offers a CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) export connector.  In fact, this is the way that many customers integrate Ephesoft with Alfresco.  While Documentum does have an add-on to enable CMIS with Content Server, this CMIS specification offers only a small subset of the functionality that the Documentum core Java API (DFC) offers.

As an alternative, we chose to use OpenMigrate to export content into Documentum.  Here’s how it all came together:

• Documents are scanned, OCRed, and metadata is indexed using Ephesoft
• After indexing, scanned images are exported by Ephesoft as text-searchable PDF documents to a drop folder
• Indexed metadata for the documents is exported by Ephesoft to a drop folder as well in XML format. The XML contains paths to the corresponding PDF documents
• OpenMigrate was configured to run on a schedule to watch the Ephesoft drop folder for new XML metadata files
• OpenMigrate parses the XML metadata files, picks up the corresponding PDF documents and imports the content into Documentum using the DFC API

Because OpenMigrate already had source connectors supporting ingestion from XML and file system, as well as a robust Documentum target adapter, the integration of Ephesoft with Documentum boiled down to just configuring OpenMigrate.  We were able to show the client a working demo after spending only minimal effort configuring Ephesoft and OpenMigrate.

As mentioned above, we could have attempted to use Documentum’s CMIS services in conjunction with the Ephesoft CMIS export module, but using OpenMigrate had the following advantages:

• Documentum only supports the minimum required features of the CMIS specification, which severely limits the export capabilities. OpenMigrate, on the other hand, connects to the Documentum repository via the DFC API, which provides access to all Documentum features, including those not supported in the CMIS spec, such as applying lifecycles, starting workflows, adding renditions, etc.
• The OpenMigrate export approach using DFC is more future-proof than using CMIS. The CMIS specification is relatively new and continues to evolve.  The 1.0 CMIS specification was released in 2011, and the latest 1.1 specification was released in late 2013.  On the other hand, the DFC API has remained stable and relatively unchanged for the past 10+ years.
• OpenMigrate provides multi-threading capabilities for high throughput for moving large volumes of content from Ephesoft to Documentum, while taking the burden off of the Ephesoft infrastructure.
• OpenMigrate can act as a “middle man” and provides opportunity for configuring additional metadata transformation or content manipulation (watermarks, overlays) prior to pushing content into Documentum.

In summary, OpenMigrate provides a simple solution for shepherding content from Ephesoft to Documentum using configuration of existing components wand without any coding.  Please post any comments or questions below.