• 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

What makes migrating from a Legacy ECM systems so difficult?

You are here: Home / ECM 101 / What makes migrating from a Legacy ECM systems so difficult?

February 10, 2017

While many of our clients are embracing modern interfaces for new ECM systems, migrating the content from a legacy ECM can often be a difficult effort due to the complexity and cost of a migration. Over the last 21 years, TSG has migrated applications and content for clients from a variety of legacy ECM envrionments (even homegrown solutions).  This post will address some of the more common migration complexities and our best practices to reduce the cost and effort for legacy ECM migration.

Reasons why migrating is difficult and some of the ways to reduce risk

  • Requirements change – when migrating to an ECM system with a modern interface, clients often see the requirements of the new interface evolve over the course of the project. The migration team must then adapt to the changing requirements to migrate new fields or develop new logic to populate attributes that aren’t in the old system. The best way to adapt to these changes is to use a configurable migration tool, such as OpenMigrate. Doing so will ease the pain of adapting to new requirements by allowing these changes to take place at a configuration layer when possible, instead of writing custom code. For example OpenMigrate provides easy ways to update dates, replace bad attributes values with the correct data, and map old data structures into the modern object models the new ECM system requires.
  • Workflows, lifecycles, users, and renditions need to be migrated – our clients have found that it’s not just documents and metadata that must be migrated, but every state that is associated with the documents as well. This can be easy or hard depending on a company’s understanding of their own systems complexity and source system. The tool you use to migrate your documents must be able to migrate these extra pieces. TSG has extensive experience migrating from the most complex environments and if the connector does not already exist, it can be easily created. Even if it is a homegrown solution, many times we will configure a database connector  or even against an API layer to pull all required components.
  • Speed is a factor – when migrating, there are many ways speed can become an issue. For some clients the consideration is time until the new system is released, but for others the consideration is how many documents per second the migration tool can move.
    • For speed of the migration, a migration needs to be multi-threaded to allow the highest throughput the system will allow. Benchmarks from the production servers should always be done when possible to get the best estimate of how long a migration will take.
    • When the largest consideration is time until the new system is released, TSG often recommends a delta migration approach over a “big bang” migration. Using a delta approach to move smaller chunks of content at a time lessens the risk associated with moving everything at once and turning the old system off. If system up-time is a worry, the delta migration approach will allow the migration team to migrate during off hours to minimize impact on the business.
  • User Training and adoption – Many times the most difficult part of a migration is the one that is most commonly overlooked. Many clients have found when migrating to a new system training users to use the new system is harder than the physical migration itself. Often, users are comfortable with the old system and may not be keen on changing their processes and workflows. TSG’s experience with clients has shown that creating pilot groups to get familiar with the system and provide feedback before the system is “turned on” for everyone is immensely helpful. These pilot users can then act as trainers and ambassadors for the new system to create excitement and help with the transition.

Conclusion

There is a lot to think about when migrating content because every migration presents its own unique challenges and requirements.  While it’s not easy, hopefully the above client experiences provide methodologies, tips, and tools that can make the process as accurate and stress-free as possible.


Free FileNet Migration Case Study




Filed Under: ECM 101, Migrations, OpenMigrate

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Documentum to Veeva Vault – Migration for Life Sciences says:
    April 18, 2019 at 9:52 am

    […] What makes migrating from a Legacy ECM systems so difficult? […]

    Reply
  2. Veeva Vault and Cross Repository Searching says:
    April 23, 2019 at 8:47 am

    […] not realistic in the short to mid-term (1-5 years) given the variety of issues with migration (What Makes Migrating from Legacy ECM Systems So Difficult) as well as the change management involved in moving multiple key systems to a new platform. As a […]

    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

  • ECM Migrations – Top Ten Planning Tips For a Successful Migration
  • Alfresco – Do More with OpenMigrate Services
  • AODocs Migration with OpenMigrate
  • FileNet Migration – Not as hard as you think?
  • FileNet Support – Migrating to mitigate the risk of an unsupportable product
  • FileNet Migrations – Best Practices for Large Migrations
  • Migrations – Why do they fail? (12 Worst Practices)
  • Reference Architecture for Content Management on Azure HDInsight with HBase
  • IBM Content Manager and Content Manager onDemand (CMOD) Migrations – How to Migrate Quickly
  • File Formats Lessons Learned – Legacy ECM Migrations

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