Overview

A Fortune 100 life sciences company has taken a significant step toward modernizing its enterprise content management and search capabilities by implementing Veladocs as part of its global enterprise search strategy. The company needed a scalable, secure, and intuitive solution to improve access to policy, procedure, and manufacturing documentation stored in Documentum, its legacy ECM system hosted on AWS. The result is a cloud-first solution leveraging Veladocs on Azure, enabling global access with enhanced security, performance, and usability.

The Challenge

The company’s global search implementation was end-of-lifed (EOL) by the vendor and was becoming more challenging to support and maintain due to its server-focused architecture. The synchronization process was error-prone, requiring a custom-built consistency checker to confirm that content in the search portal matched the primary ECM repository. 

The Solution: Veladocs Implementation

Veladocs was deployed in a private Microsoft Azure cloud environment and integrated with the company’s existing Documentum repository, which resides in AWS. The solution is powered by the following Docuvela software components:

• Veladocs repository for Azure is used to store content that is accessed by users worldwide. The ability to access content through Azure APIs vs. proprietary methods has simplified integrations and significantly reduced development and support costs.
  
• Veladocs.sync handles the initial publication and ongoing synchronization of content every fifteen minutes from Documentum to Azure Blob storage. Built on Apache Airflow, this approach improves resiliency and eliminates the need for a separate consistency checker. As a testimony to its resilience, Veladocs.sync initially migrated 10.5 million documents with only a few hours of manual intervention required.
  
• Veladocs.overlay enhances document security and viewing by applying security restrictions to PDF files such as the ability to print, copy and sign documents. It also dynamically watermarks files with metadata such as document number, approval date, status, user name, and timestamp. This ensures traceability across internal and external sharing.

Security is tightly integrated – only released content is searchable, and user access is governed by strict permission controls.

Results & Benefits

• Enhanced User Experience: Users now benefit from modern metadata and AI-powered search capabilities that dramatically improve document discovery.
  
• Resiliency & Business Continuity: The new system’s Azure cloud architecture ensures continued access even if the primary Documentum system or AWS hosting environment is unavailable.
  
• Improved Maintenance & Support: A serverless, cloud-native design reduces infrastructure complexity and support overhead.
  
• Scalability: The Azure-based deployment supports rapid scaling during peak periods, allowing for both horizontal and vertical scaling of document view and overlay requests in response to user demand.
  
• Eliminated Redundancy: Veladocs.sync eliminates the need for a consistency checker, offering a more reliable and automated solution.
  

A Modern ECM Milestone

Beyond streamlining operations, the new system significantly enhanced the end-user experience. Employees now access content through an intuitive, AI-powered interface that supports natural language search – enabling them to find the right documents faster and work more efficiently across departments and regions.

“Our newly released Search Portal not only aligns with our cloud-first strategy, it also gives users a faster, smarter way to find what matters,” said the system owner. “It’s rewarding to see such immediate impact across a global user base.”

Migrating millions of documents is rarely straightforward. It typically demands extensive planning, constant oversight, and countless hours managing batch jobs and tracking failures. With Veladocs.sync, however, the company completed the migration of 10.5 million documents seamlessly, with minimal manual effort and zero downtime.

“Using Veladocs.sync to migrate 10.5 million documents was a game changer,” said Dan Grumieaux, one of Veladocs’ founding engineers. “The process ran end-to-end with just a few hours of manual intervention, compared to the usual grind of managing batches, tracking failures, and requeuing documents. It was seamless, with zero downtime, and freed us up to focus on higher-value work.”

Next Steps

Encouraged by the success of this deployment, the company plans to expand its Veladocs-based architecture by integrating additional content sources, including Veeva and other repositories, to create a unified search experience across all business-critical documentation. If a Search Portal or migrations are in your future ECM plans, please reach out to learn more.