TSG has recently seen several existing and new clients looking to migrate content from Mobius Content Services to other Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms. Reasons for migrating include consolidation of disparate ECM systems, the desire to move to a NoSQL ECM such as TSG’s DynamoDB and Hadoop solutions, and the need to regularly extract content in order to integrate with other systems. As a result, TSG has developed a Mobius connector for OpenMigrate. This post will discuss OpenMigrate’s ability to migrate from Mobius Content Services.
Understanding Mobius Content Services
As an ECM system, Mobius can be categorized as a platform that does well with high-volume ingestion of content, such as feeds from a mainframe, print spools, Laser Printer Formatted Data (LPFD), and integrations with other enterprise systems. Some examples of LPFD are PDF, PostScript, PCL, and Advanced Functional Presentation (AFP) archives. Once ingestion jobs are configured, Mobius provides a system for storage and retrieval of content and metadata that can be accessed directly by users, or integrated with other applications. It is primarily focused on high-volume processing and offers a limited feature set and user experience relative to other ECM vendors (Documentum, Alfresco, HBase etc.)
TSG has frequently seen Mobius used as an archival system in industries with very high volumes of computer-generated content, such as invoices, statements, and reports. The architecture and uses for Mobius are aligned with other ECM platforms designed for high-volume archival and records management, such as IBM Content Manager OnDemand and OpenText (formerly Documentum) ApplicationXtender.
Within Mobius, the top-level container for content storage is a repository. Within the repository, documents are organized into document classes. Each document class has a defined set of metadata fields, which are referred to as indexes. These concepts are fairly standard amongst ECM systems. Because Mobius specializes in managing high-volume computer-generated content, policies can be defined for automatically extracting index data from the content as it’s being ingested into Mobius.
Mobius includes a REST API, making it easy to integrate with other applications. The API supports common ECM functions, such as search, upload, and content streaming.
Mobius Source for OpenMigrate
Before getting into the specifics of the OpenMigrate integration with Mobius, below is a quick overview of the core components of OpenMigrate:
- Migration Engine and Pipeline – orchestrates the migration and manages all subsequent migration components
- Queue Populator – generates the list of all of the objects (documents) to be migrated for a particular migration run
- Queue – the “to-do” list for a migration
- Source Adaptor – extracts content and metadata from the source system
- Target Adaptor – pushes content and metadata to the target system
- Log – provides detailed tracking of all objects (documents) migrated, including any failures
While engineering a source connector for OpenMigrate to extract content and metadata from Mobius, TSG determined that the best approach was to leverage the Mobius REST API. This allows for connecting to Mobius over standard web protocols. The points of integration include a queue populator for Mobius migrations, as well as a source adaptor.
- Mobius Queue Populator – utilizes the Mobius Search Service to execute a query against the Mobius index data. The Search Service returns a list of document IDs that match the query criteria. The queue populator loads the list of document IDs into the migration queue.
- Mobius Source Adaptor
- Load Metadata – for each document in the migration queue, the Mobius Source adaptor makes a call to the Mobius Metadata Service to retrieve the metadata (indexes) for the document.
- Load Content – for each document being migrated, the Mobius Source adaptor calls the Mobius Content Stream Service to extract the content file from Mobius. Note that depending of the format of the document being stored, Mobius can render the content into various formats (text, image, PDF, etc.)
OpenMigrate Advantages over other migration approaches
By using OpenMigrate to migrate content from Mobius, clients can take advantage of the all of the existing built-in features of the tool, including:
- Interchangeable Target Adaptors – allows Mobius content and/or metadata to be migrated to a wide variety of target systems supported by OpenMigrate, including:
- Solr
- Elasticsearch
- Relational Database (JDBC)
- File System
- Multi-Threading Capabilities – provides for maximum throughput for high-volume migrations
- Metadata Mapping – perform transformation/translation of metadata before pushing to the target system
- Migration Logging – provides detailed auditing/tracking of the success/failure status of all objects being migrated
- Delta Migration – for a large migration, the ability to perform an initial bulk migration of the backlog of content and then perform a smaller “delta” migration to pick up any new or changed content since the start of the bulk migration
- Rolling Migration – migrate content on-demand to the target system with a rolling migration approach
Summary
OpenMigrate can now be used to migrate content from Mobius to a variety of target systems. Utilizing the Mobius REST API, OpenMigrate provides an industry-proven platform for high-throughput migration from Mobius Content Services in a one-time bulk migration, or in an ongoing basis.
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