As we presented yesterday, one of the bigger issues with FileNet Migrations was clients that have leveraged the COLD format and how TSG has come up with our own adapter to help clients move away from FileNet COLD to a less proprietary PDF format. The discussion got us thinking about what other formats need special attention during legacy ECM migrations. This post will discuss some of the various formats and our lessons learned for migrations. TIFF – Tagged Image File Format For ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet COLD Migration – Cracking the proprietary format issue
One of the most difficult things about migrating off of FileNet happens for those clients that have relied on leveraging the FileNet COLD format for storage of computer generated documents from internal systems. Built in the 1990’s in a time when network bandwidth and storage conservation was paramount, the format is unlike any others, badly documented online and very difficult to easily convert into non-proprietary, standard formats like PDF. This post will present how TSG was able ... [Continue Reading]
The Deep Analysis Podcast – The 11 Billion File Benchmark
Dave Giordano, CEO of TSG, recently sat down with Alan Pelz-Sharpe to discuss our recent 11 Billion File Benchmark on AWS and DynamoDB. Additionally, hear Dave's thoughts on the future of ECM and why companies are considering alternatives to the traditional ECM Suite. ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet Migration – Recorded Alfresco/TSG Webinar – 05/29/2019
On May 29th, 2019, TSG and Alfresco hosted a webinar detailing an innovative solution for migrating off of FileNet onto more modern ECM solutions. Taking the approach of a rolling migration combined with offline access methods enabled users to stop running FileNet very quickly compared to a traditional “big bang” migration approach. When IBM dropped their support for FileNet Content Manager 5.2 on April 30th, many customers were left stranded with an old, unsupported version that may have ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet – How to retire in weeks, not months – Alfresco Webinar May 29
Tony Parzgnat, the OpenMigrate Senior Product Manager, will be conducting a webinar with Alfresco May 29th on an innovative approach to retire FileNet. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco Guest Blog – How to retire FileNet quickly and avoid those large support payments.
TSG was a guest contributor to the Alfresco blog site this week. ... [Continue Reading]
Federated Search versus Rolling Migration
In moving our legacy repositories customers to new modern solutions, one of the major recommendations to reduce cost, risk and stress is a rolling migration. In a discussion with a client last week, there was some confusion in mixing a rolling migration with a federated search. This post will discuss the differences and how a rolling migration is more practical for moving and retiring legacy repositories. ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet – How to retire in weeks rather than months
Many of the TSG customers and prospects on FileNet are struggling with old versions of FileNet that have lived for decades with millions and even billions of documents. For clients looking to reduce the cost of supporting FileNet as soon as possible, TSG can leverage some innovative solutions, including a rolling migration combined with offline access methods from TSG’s OpenMigrate to allow customers to stop running FileNet considerably earlier than a full migration effort would typically ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet to AWS – An 80 Million Document Case Study
As part of TSG’s ongoing efforts to assist clients move from legacy ECM systems like FileNet to modern cloud alternatives, TSG has recently published a case study highlighting how one FileNet customer was able to successfully move to Amazon Web Services. ... [Continue Reading]
Migrating to Alfresco – Reducing Risk, Stress and Cost with a Rolling Migration
Too often, migrating to Alfresco can be seen as a massive undertaking where the migration effort means moving all the content, integrations and people to the new platform in a migrate all at once, "Big Bang” approach. Given the effort to move all the different components, along with training the users on a new system, it is easy to see why so many legacy ECM systems are still around today as their owners can, when confronted with this daunting task, choose to “wait until next year”. TSG has ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet and CMOD – Will IBM finally sell them and potentially buy Box?
One of our more controversial posts over the last couple of years was back in 2017 “FileNet – Is IBM Planning on Selling it”. We had some interesting follow-up – particularly on LinkedIn from some folks at IBM that were not to happy with our analysis. At the time we stated that “we would expect that IBM would sell off FileNet and potentially Content Manager within the next two years”. With two years coming up in May and the recent news of IBM selling off Notes and buying Red ... [Continue Reading]
Gartner Content Service Platforms (CPS) Magic Quadrant 2018 – What’s Missing?
Back in 2015, we posted the question of whether the magic quadrant was really magic anymore. In the following years, Gartner has evolved the rating with a complete change of the evaluation in 2016 as well as the big news in 2017 when IBM/FileNet being dropped from the leader quadrant after being the default leader for 10+ years. In the recent 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant (download from Alfresco here), Gartner has made more changes along with IBM being back in the leader quadrant. This post ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet Support to End in 2019
IBM has formally announced that it is dropping support for FileNet version 5.2.X on April 30th, 2019. FileNet customers on 5.2.X need to decide whether to upgrade to the 5.5 version, run unsupported, or migrate to another option. This post will present our thoughts from talking with a FileNet customer working through the decision process. ... [Continue Reading]
Federated Search and Content Services – Is a Publishing Approach better?
Over the last couple of years, some ECM vendors have been touting a Federated Search model to “cure” the issue of access to document content contained in legacy ECM systems. Whether from an ECM vendor like Nuxeo or supporting software vendor like Simflofy, the marketing message of getting access to multiple repositories from one search hearkens back to the previous promises from Enterprise Search vendors like Automony that never really fulfilled their promise. This post will discuss the ... [Continue Reading]
Migrating FileNet with Daeja Annotations to AWS S3
Currently TSG is working with several clients who are looking to move away from FileNet to AWS S3 and/or a modern ECM. A unique requirements is that the migration includes both documents and annotations. In a previous post, we wrote about migrating from FileNet to AWS S3 and focused on how to move the documents with conversion of proprietary TIFF to PDF. For this post we will address moving the annotations for those clients with a Daeja viewer annotations to a more standard, non-proprietary ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet and Content Manager (CMOD) Migration to Amazon Web Services – Why Now?
As many long-time readers know, TSG has been assisting clients with migrating from Legacy ECM platforms including FileNet, Documentum, OpenText and others for years. Recently we have noticed an uptick in interest, RFPs, and implementation efforts to migrate customers not only from the Legacy ECM system but also to the cloud and specifically Amazon Web Services. This post will specifically focus on the legacy IBM ECM suite that includes FileNet and Content Manager/Content Manager on Demand and ... [Continue Reading]
2018 Thoughts and Predictions as well as recap of 2017 postings
2017 was the busiest year ever for the TSG blog. Whether it was the finalization of the purchase of Documentum by OpenText or Gartner’s 180 on IBM, we had our most active year with over 60,000 views of our different articles. This post will highlight some of the most popular articles as well as our predictions for 2018. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco and Amazon Web Services – Disrupting Legacy Content Services – Alfresco Day London – Keynote
TSG gave a keynote presentation on December 7th for Alfresco Day London. Our topic “Alfresco and AWS – Disrupting Legacy Content Services” presented our thoughts on how the combination of a movement to the cloud, specifically Amazon’s cloud, along with the additional content created by digital transformation is disrupting the main Legacy ECM vendors. This post will share our slide deck along with some of our narrative. ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet – Migrating to Amazon S3
We had an interesting call with an insurance client yesterday currently on FileNet but looking for ways to start to move away from FileNet to a more modern solution, preferably in the cloud. Their existing FileNet implementation was slightly unique in that they didn’t rely on FileNet to store any specific attributes about the document, instead storing all document attributes in their Claim Management system (based on Guidewire) with simple pointers to the FileNet F_DOCNUMBER as the FileNet ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco – The Importance of being Cloud Native compared to Legacy ECM vendors
In a recent Cloud Foundry Summit 2017 interview with Mojgan Lefebvre, SVP and CIO Liberty Mutual Global Specialty described how important it was that their first cloud initiative be Document Management and specifically, Alfresco due to its cloud native architecture. This post will share our agreement on why cloud native is a critical component for evaluating Document Management alternatives and compare vendor offerings. ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet – IBM removed from Gartner’s Leader Quadrant for Content Service Platforms – What Happened?
Gartner recently released their 2017 analysis of content service platforms. () In 2016, Gartner changed from evaluating Enterprise Content Management to a renamed approach focused on Content Service Platforms. Since the beginning of the ECM ratings over 20 years ago, FileNet combined with IBM has always been recognized as a leader claiming the highest position both in terms of completeness of vision and ability to execute in 2016. This year’s 2017 rating dropped FileNet – IBM from Leader to ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet – What is the business case to replace it?
Last week we met with two different companies considering moving from FileNet to a more modern ECM, Alfresco. For both customers, while they liked some of the features and functions of a more modern interface stressed the need to come up with a good business case. This post will discuss the development of a business case with both a hard and soft dollar items for the replacement of FileNet with Alfresco. ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet – Adding a Modern Interface to a Legacy ECM
As mentioned in multiple posts, TSG has many clients stuck on Legacy ECM tools like FileNet, Documentum and OpenText. While most of the posts here are focused on how to migrate to a modern ECM environment sometimes the burden of moving all of the documents and interfaces can be too daunting. For this post, we will discuss how one client was able to add a modern interface (the TSG OpenContent Compliance Solution) to a Legacy FileNet system. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco Guest Contributor – Documentum, FileNet & OpenText – should I stay or should I go?
Dave Giordano, President and Founder of TSG, was invited to be a guest contributor on the Alfresco blog. His latest article covers the struggle legacy ECM customers have when choosing to stay or leave their existing implementations. With the cloud, cost savings and rapid growth of Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) vendors like AWS, legacy ECM customers are considering cloud ECM alternatives. While concern about the effort of moving documents and integrations to a new platform has in the past ... [Continue Reading]
EFFS Promises and Legacy ECM Vendors – ECM Article Roundup
A couple of interesting ECM posts from some of the different analysts that were worth sharing over the last couple of weeks. This post will present some of those articles as well as our thoughts. ... [Continue Reading]
