Documentum Migration to Veeva Vault – Best Practices

TSG has been assisting clients with document migrations, and particularly regulated clients, for over twenty years.  For additional background and best practices – see our ECM Migrations – Top Ten Planning Tips for a Successful Migration.  TSG has recently become an emerging
Veeva parnter.  One of our first efforts is to provide Documentum clients with our thoughts, best practices and some of our software to facilitate moving from Documentum to Veeva Vault.  This post will present our initial thoughts on a variety of ways to migrate from Documentum to Veeva Vault.

Documentum Migration to Veeva Vault – Manual Approach

For smaller clients, one way to start working with Veeva is to manually start loading documents into Veeva Vault.    This would be done by uploading documents through the Veeva interface. Multiple documents can be imported at once as long as they are the same type.

Benefits

• Clients can gradually move documents and departments off Documentum to Veeva
• When importing multiple documents, the Veeva interface has the ability to set the value of a property once and have it apply to all documents in the set

Things to consider

• Moving old versions and audit trails are difficult, and should only be done with the Vault Loader or another migration tool
• Cannot import a document directly to a specific lifecycle state such as Approved or Effective
• Large volume of content would be manually intensive and error prone

Documentum Migration to Veeva Vault– Vault Loader

One traditional way to move from Documentum to Veeva is to leverage Veeva’s Vault Loader.  For this approach content from Documentum would need to be dumped to a Local or Network drive with meta-data stored in a CSV file as required.  TSG can leverage OpenMigrate, our migration tool, out of the box to export content and create the CSV file.  Keep in mind that all of the things mentioned earlier in our Top Ten Planning Tips for a Successful Migration still apply.  TSG typically works with clients to determine the mapping and transformation steps required when moving content from Documentum into Veeva. For example, Veeva requires the following fields to be specified for every document: Name of Lifecycle, Type, Subtype and Classification. Additional fields may need to be transformed. For example, if moving multiple sites into a common periodic review interval, the next periodic review date may need to be calculated to be 2 years from the Last Periodic Review Date value.

While OpenMigrate has been validated for multiple clients, leveraging the Vault Loader would require a two-step migration, with some manual intervention required. The manual steps involved would be adding in the header fields and generation of a separate export file for renditions only. Under these circumstances we have seen some QA departments require the output of both OpenMigrate and the Vault Loader to be validated. This validation check in 2 places is a significant impact for migrations with thousands of documents and large sample sets. As an alternative, clients with small enough volumes might consider a manual validation.

Benefits

• Can automatically move versions, renditions, relationships and audit trail data
• Recommended way to load user, group, and value assistance lists

Things to consider

• Up to three load files would be required for each migration to migrate content, renditions and relationships
• Some manual intervention is required
• Validation of process may require checking data at multiple points due to required manual intervention steps
• Delta Migrations can get tricky due to manual cleanup/deletion effort required in Veeva

Documentum Migration to Veeva Vault – OpenMigrate Approach

TSG has recently added a Veeva Vault target to OpenMigrate.  Leveraging the Veeva Vault target allows clients to perform one-step migrations from Documentum to Veeva.   OpenMigrate can migrate metadata, content, and renditions for multiple versions. Relationship/Linking of documents to Change Requests or other documents is supported as well as other content and metadata transformations.  Clients that validate OpenMigrate can continue to use OpenMigrate for ongoing migrations into Veeva Vault.

With the new OpenMigrate target for Veeva Vault, OpenMigrate can now support the following Migration Scenarios

• Big Bang – Where all the content including versions are migrated from Documentum to Veeva Vault over a given time span or weekend.  Users would be off the system while the migration is occurring and would begin working in Veeva once the migration is complete with Documentum being retired.
• Delta Migration – In this scenario, documents would be moved but users could continue to work in Documentum for a given period of time.  Once the migration is approved, the final set of changed documents in Documentum would be migrated to Veeva Vault in a delta approach to keep Veeva content up to date.  This approach also allows downtime to be minimized. Users would gradually stop using Documentum over time allowing a gradual migration of users to Veeva Vault.
• Gradual Migration – OpenMigrate jobs can be configured to move only certain documents and users.  This type of migration makes sense for certain documents or users and could be combined with Delta Migrations. 

Benefits

• Real-time migration simplifies the migration and validation effort
• No manual intervention makes process repeatable and reduces errors
• OpenMigrate can be used for both one-time migrations and ongoing ingestion effort

Things to consider

• While OpenMigrate is offered to TSG clients for no cost, OpenMigrate usage does require a consulting engagement with TSG.

Summary

Migrating from Documentum to Veeva Vault can be accomplished with either a manual, bulk load or real-time approach.  Migrating from Documentum to Veeva Vault doesn’t have to be a difficult process if the right methodology, approach and partners are leveraged.

---