Often, migrating a legacy Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system can be seen as a massive undertaking where the migration effort means moving all the content, integrations, and users to the new platform in a migrate-all-at-once, “big bang” approach. Given the massive effort to move all of the components and integrations, along with training the users on a new system, it is easy to understand why so many legacy ECM systems are still around today since owners choose the “status quo” approach.

The “status quo” approach – remaining on a legacy application – has many downsides: lack of support, lack of innovation, lack of knowledge, difficult to integrate, and not cloud-native. All these reasons come with a cost. 

While migrating to a modern Content Services platform can be daunting, there are a few migration approaches that we have seen over the years that ease the risk and provide a more palatable approach. 

This article will detail how both gradual and rolling migrations can be used to ease content and people into the new system to reduce risk, stress, and costs typically associated with large-scale migrations. 

Gradual Migration

A gradual migration strategy is an approach that can be taken to reduce the complexity and risk of massive migrations. In a gradual migration, departments or subsets of users are migrated individually in phases. The source system is decommissioned after all departments have been migrated. The benefits of this approach are:

• Departments move on their own timelines. Coordinating all departments to move at once can be difficult to coordinate.
• Training can occur gradually, allowing for departments or subsets of users to be trained for their specific use case. It is much easier to provide a high quality go-live experience to a department or two versus the entire company.
• The user interface, application sizing, and other system resources can be tuned gradually as more users are brought on, making it easier to delight the end users.
• Integrations, if specific to a department or group, can be moved over time.

A gradual migration allows for a big migration to be broken up into smaller parts, and significantly increases the success rate of the project.

Rolling Migration

With a rolling migration, the users would begin to use the new system immediately, and content is migrated from the source system on demand when requested by the user. This approach has several benefits:

• It allows all users to immediately take advantage of the new user interface.
• There is no system downtime for initial bulk migration.
• Content is migrated as needed, making it easy to identify content that is not used.
• Integrations, such as ingestion feeds, can be gradually moved over time.

This approach is especially helpful when migrating off a legacy system with numerous integration points. For example, let’s assume we are a utility company and have a large FileNet repository holding content (bills, contracts, etc.) for all of our customers and we are moving that content to the Alfresco platform.

1. We would first set up the new repository and configure the new application to receive and manage the content. We would also set up the migration software to pull content from the legacy repository into the new repository.
2. On day one, when a user requested to view a customer file, the migration software would access the legacy repository and move that customer content into the new repository “on demand.” If the customer doesn’t yet exist in the new repository, the customer folder is created, and the contents from the legacy repository are migrated into the new repository. This step will allow the end users to perform actions on the content (search, view, annotate, add new content, etc.) in the new repository. Moving the content and metadata from the legacy repository could potentially include transforming steps such as TIFFs to PDFs and populate a repository that is managed in the cloud or on-premise.
3. On subsequent requests for the same customer, the migration utility would always look in the legacy repository to verify that nothing new has been added for the customer and migrate over any new content.
4. Over time the ingestion and other integrations would be integrated with the new repository and the legacy application could be decommissioned.

This rolling migration approach allows end users to begin taking advantage of the modern interface while content ingestion feeds, other integrations, and even users to be gradually migrated over time. This process reduces the stress and effort required to migrate large, complex legacy ECM systems allowing complex changes to be phased in over time.

In the example above, interfaces are set up and end users are directed to the new application, but integration and the large migration effort is phased in over time. In addition to the rolling migration, most companies will have a background migration process running, so the new repository can catch up and the legacy ECM system can be decommissioned in a reasonable amount of time. 

Choosing the Right Strategy

A gradual migration approach is recommended whenever content can be subdivided by department/group or historical versus. active. This approach allows for soft go-lives, where lessons can be learned and approaches tuned, so on-boarding of future groups can benefit from the lessons learned. 

Rolling migrations are typically used when a massive amount of content needs to be moved and/or there are multiple integrations and content feeds that need to be repointed to the new system. 

One thing to consider is that both approaches above can extend migration timelines. If the ongoing maintenance cost of your legacy application is a significant concern, we can couple the approaches above with an ongoing background migration or a temporary export to the file system to speed up the ability to fully retire the legacy application.

Please reach out to Docuvela for a more tailored discussion on what strategy is best for your situation.