Today I am going to write my experiences with a project which involved migration from one document management system to another.
Actually, there were three different DMS's that were involved. The problem was to migrate the multiple GBs of content from 2 different DMS to a 3rd one. It was was something like centralizing the documents stored across different locations of an organisation to a central DMS.
This looks like a current general trend in the industry as it makes more sense for them to manage the data centrally.This not only helps them in storing it but also helps in applying policies, workflows, software upgrade and IT policies, patches etc while adding another level of security to the enterprise data when stored centrally.
The approach for this task of migrating the documents is achieved using the respective APIs of the concerned DMS. We built utilities which connects to the server of respective DMS and fetches the data and copies the documents along with their metadata in a an XML file while the documents gets copied using the same APIs to a temporary location (shared folder).
The target DMS is also accessed via its APIs for copying the documents and the metadata from XML while performing check-ins for each document from the shared folder.
Now these operation s are not that easy as it sounds because we had several thousands of documents which needed to be downloaded and uploaded only in small batches, otherwise the operation may stop or get terminated by the host operating system processes automatically allowing this task to never get completed.
But with careful planning and execution using schedulers enabled the task to get completed in smaller chunks and therefore the entire job was completed successfully.
Just note while writing your custom utility give proper administrator rights and the correct url of the server and document libraries in the respective document management systems.
Actually, there were three different DMS's that were involved. The problem was to migrate the multiple GBs of content from 2 different DMS to a 3rd one. It was was something like centralizing the documents stored across different locations of an organisation to a central DMS.
This looks like a current general trend in the industry as it makes more sense for them to manage the data centrally.This not only helps them in storing it but also helps in applying policies, workflows, software upgrade and IT policies, patches etc while adding another level of security to the enterprise data when stored centrally.
The approach for this task of migrating the documents is achieved using the respective APIs of the concerned DMS. We built utilities which connects to the server of respective DMS and fetches the data and copies the documents along with their metadata in a an XML file while the documents gets copied using the same APIs to a temporary location (shared folder).
The target DMS is also accessed via its APIs for copying the documents and the metadata from XML while performing check-ins for each document from the shared folder.
Now these operation s are not that easy as it sounds because we had several thousands of documents which needed to be downloaded and uploaded only in small batches, otherwise the operation may stop or get terminated by the host operating system processes automatically allowing this task to never get completed.
But with careful planning and execution using schedulers enabled the task to get completed in smaller chunks and therefore the entire job was completed successfully.
Just note while writing your custom utility give proper administrator rights and the correct url of the server and document libraries in the respective document management systems.
