Posted by Kelsey Fagan on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 @ 04:04 PM
Crown is the EMC Documentum content migration expert for a good reason – we have a LOT of content migrations under our collective belts. We have been helping customers successfully migrate content into, out of, and between Documentum repositories for years. Those projects have given us a unique perspective and a depth of knowledge on the migration process. This knowledge has given rise to our award-winning Buldoser and Buldoser Center products that greatly streamline the migration process – but it has also given us a broader view of factors that can significantly contribute to the success of any content migration undertaking.
Think Before You Jump
It seems simple (even obvious) to suggest planning before undertaking a content migration effort. But we have seen migration planning slip through the cracks time and time again. As competing priorities vie for attention, migration planning often seems to sink to the bottom of the list. This often follows one of two patterns, depending on the reason for the migration:
1) If the migration is a part of a larger project, such as moving from a legacy content-enabled application to a cutting-edge replacement, content migration often falls into afterthought territory. When push comes to shove, it’s easier to focus valuable resources on the function of the new application, because that seems to contribute most directly to the finish line: a new application that functions correctly. However, the new application will ultimately be judged not only on its features, but also on availability and accessibility of current, relevant legacy content. In most application replacement scenarios, content migration should be considered a high-risk element of the overall plan, with the potential to significantly affect the success of the project. Risk is not a bad thing—but it should be mitigated with thorough planning and testing early in the project. Remember: Respect the Migration Risk!
2) The ultimate motivation for many content migration efforts is to realize cost-savings by decommissioning a legacy content silo. The focus on urgency and cost cutting often leads to short cuts that cost more in the long run. A content migration is an inherently expensive operation with respect to time, resources, and visibility. Getting it wrong is far worse than taking a little extra time in the beginning to identify and mitigate the risks. Remember: Measure twice and cut once.
Consider the Context
A meaningful planning effort needs to go beyond simply selecting a migration technology and laying out an arbitrary project plan. The planning phase should be focused around identifying risks to the overall success of the migration, and developing strategies to mitigate those risks. One area of risk that sometimes flies under the radar is dependencies from inside and outside of the source content store:
- Do other systems link to the content items by ID, path, or name?
- Is the content exposed to users through a portal or integration to another system?
- To what extent does the business depend on the security and access controls levied on the content?
Failure to anticipate the business impact of a migration is among the most significant risks in any content migration project. A migration may be executed flawlessly, but if moving the content from one place to another breaks established business processes without warning, it will likely be seen as a complete failure!
Spend time thinking about how it would impact the business if the source content store disappeared completely. Then think about ways to minimize that impact through metadata and security mapping, new integrations, and end-user training.
Details Matter
While big-picture issues present the largest overall risk to the success or failure of a migration project, it is usually the very small details that cause schedule and budget overruns. Ask yourself and your team these vital questions:
- How fast will the migration run?
- Will creation and modification dates be preserved?
- Is there enough temp disk-space available for the extracted content?
- Do the same user accounts exist in the source and target so that security can be mapped?
- Do the source and target environments have the same object model, or will the schemas need to be mapped?
- If the object model is mapped, are any attributes left behind?
- Are there customizations in the source or target that will trigger time-consuming processing when documents are removed or added?
- Can any of these custom processes be deactivated or deferred until the migration is complete?
An un-optimized database behind the scenes or an unnecessary custom action could easily add several milliseconds to the migration of each document, which can quickly add up to hours, days, or even weeks of extra time for a large migration.
These details will have minimal effect on your migration if they are discovered early and addressed before the production migration. If speed is an important requirement, then it is always worthwhile to plan ahead to invest the time to optimize the performance of the migration. If you don’t have the skills to do low-level database or repository optimization, consider bringing in outside expertise.
Practice Makes Perfect
One simple solution to many of the challenges identified above is to treat the migration as a development project, rather than an operational task. You would never run code in your production environment that was not first tested in development or test environments, right? Similarly, you should never run a production migration without first configuring and testing the migration in a similarly configured development or test environment.
Use an appropriate methodology that includes small proofs-of-concept to prove the migration methodology. Then, run a more complete migration in a test environment to uncover unanticipated issues early in the project and measure migration throughput. The information gained in these test migrations will be invaluable in planning the final production migration, greatly reducing risk and increasing confidence in the successful completion of the migration on time and on budget.
written by John Moerer
Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com
Posted by Kathryn Kendell on Wed, Sep 23, 2009 @ 04:26 PM
Written by: Barry Besecker, Vice President Web & Marketing Practice
To say you rely heavily on your EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint platforms is probably an understatement. After all, they were big investments that paid off. Each platform has its strengths. And your content authors are accustomed to using the pair for content editing and publishing. Recreating all those web sites and migrating all that content to SharePoint seems a bit nightmarish. What if you could leave your content and web pages where they are, and publish content from Documentum to SharePoint as if it had been on SharePoint all along?
That's the idea behind Crown Documentum SharePoint Integration-SPIN, for short. SPIN simplifies the editing environment for your authors. It uses Crown Web Composer to marry content editing on Documentum with content publishing on SharePoint.
Here's what the process looks like for users:
- An author locates the content to edit through the SharePoint portal.
- The author clicks on the Crown Web Composer editor. Web Composer pulls and loads the content from Documentum.
- The author edits the content, and saves it. It is versioned in Documentum, transformed, and automatically published by Documentum's Site Caching Services (CCS) to a temporary file store.
In temporary storage, a post-publishing function loads the content, and all its metadata, into SharePoint and it is available for consumption through your SharePoint portals.
SPIN provides you with the best features of Documentum and SharePoint. It eliminates the complexity and cost of a tight integration. Authors can edit Documentum content directly from SharePoint because SPIN synchronizes the data and security between the two platforms. Because SPIN uses Crown Web Composer, you can continue to use your Documentum platform as you have in the past. You're simply publishing rendered Documentum content to SharePoint. Documentum is the contribution side of the equation; SharePoint is the consumption side.
Take the next step! Contact us about integrating your SharePoint and Documentum data. Visit us at http://www.crownpartners.com/ or email info@crownpartners.com
Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com
Posted by Malcolm Bliss on Sun, May 10, 2009 @ 08:32 PM
"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform", says Tim O'Reilly. "I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means.", says Tim Berners-Lee, "It's dookie." They are both right, but it doesn't matter.
Whether you agree with O'Reilly or Berners-Lee, information technology organizations must deal with the adoption of social-networking, video-sharing, wikis, blogs, and user tagging. Because people use them and businesses demand them, the infrastructure has to control and support Web 2.0 applications.
Public Web 2.0 facilities can achieve inter-company benefits, but those public facilities don't meet the large organization's need for control or support in the areas of retention, access, security, availability, and cost. In those large organizations, rogue Web 2.0 islands have likely sprung up internally and increasing adoption has caused unplanned cost and risk. Public facilities and rogue islands were fine when Web 2.0 applications were an experiment, but for many companies, enterprise-caliber infrastructure is now required.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology is a promising backbone for Web 2.0 applications. The appeal of ECM is first in the fit and maturity of the technology. ECM is designed to manage unstructured information such as addressed by Web 2.0 applications and has been proven at enterprise scale for over a decade. The appeal of ECM is also in the potential to leverage existing investments. Most large companies have existing ECM platform investments that can provide needed support and control to Web 2.0 applications.
EMC Documentum Content Server (Documentum) is playing the role of backbone for Web 2.0 applications via two different approaches. First, Documentum has traditionally played a repository role for custom-built or niche front-end applications. Documentum plays a similar back end role when used in conjunction with Web 2.0 solutions built using Crown SiteBuilder and Crown Web Gear products. In the second approach, EMC has built on it's eRoom heritage of providing application front-ends, and EMC is now extending eRoom solidly into the Web 2.0 era with its CenterStage product.
If you have enterprise-scale Web 2.0 needs, Crown can help you evaluate your options and put the appropriate infrastructure in place. Ask us about our SiteBuilder and Web Gear products and about our experience with EMC CenterStage.
Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com
Posted by Malcolm Bliss on Sun, Apr 05, 2009 @ 03:18 PM
Business is increasingly knowledge intensive. The most successful businesses have the knowledge to do the right things and do things right. That knowledge, whether nascent or explicit, whether instructive or persuasive, produces value when it's in the mind of an employee, a supplier, a distributor, or a customer. Getting knowledge into those minds drives business results.
Content refers to the documents, web pages, images, videos, and audio segments that enable business results by delivering knowledge to people. Managing content is essential for achieving compliance, efficiency, quality, and other business objectives. Fortunately, software to manage content is reaching new levels of maturity and Crown provides solutions for content management using industry leading products from EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft.
Assembling and delivering knowledge in the form of content is most efficient when supported by a "content management platform". A content management platform consists of standards, hardware, and software, supported by specific operations and personnel. A platform typically accommodates multiple business needs and serves multiple departments, cost centers, divisions and business units. A platform provides cost advantages that result from sharing expense across a large number of users or applications and the related economies of scale. It also increases service levels, because service-enabling investments that could not be afforded for a single application can be afforded for a collection of applications.
A content management platform provides greatest knowledge advantages when it is used to add and preserve value in each step of the enterprise value chain. Conveying content and knowledge via a single enterprise platform is more consistent and economical than stringing together islands of content management. Below are a few examples of the content produced and used at each section of the value chain. Just as value snowballs through the value chain, content critical for later sections of the value chain should reference and incorporate content in the earlier sections of the value chain.
1. Supply steps in the value chain: raw materials, component, and capital equipment specifications; contractor services descriptions; job skill requirements; capital or financing plans.
2. Central steps in the value chain: procedures that define the integration of inputs with additional sources of value within the firm; management reports; go to market plans; work-in-progress and finished output specifications.
3. Distribution steps in the value chain: sales and marketing material, product documentation, warrantees and guarantees, service descriptions.
With more than 500 content management "go-lives" using industry leading software from EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft, Crown understands the importance of knowledge and how to deliver it throughout an enterprise using content. We look forward to exploring the ways that experience can help your organization get the most out of its knowledge.
Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com
Posted by Malcolm Bliss on Sun, Mar 15, 2009 @ 09:22 PM
Crown's Buldoser product is celebrating its fifth anniversary of accreditation awarded by Documentum and EMC. Having been in commercial use as a Crown project utility since 2001 and licensed as a supported software product since 2003, Buldoser was first accredited as Designed for Documentum in 2004. It has been continuously accredited during the five intervening years.
Much has changed during Buldoser's life, and much has stayed the same. Crown's Buldoser initially became popular as an alternative to "Dump and Load" and home-grown approaches for moving content. In the early days, Buldoser moved content among Documentum repositories, file systems, and ODBC-compliant information stores. The changes in Buldoser's life have occurred via four major releases and supporting minor releases. Now Buldoser has broadened into a family of extract, transform, and load (ETL) products. The family includes Buldoser, Buldoser Center, and RedCarpet. These products each have a distinct and complementary purpose. As a family, they address a wide range of use cases such as migration, archiving, synchronization, and others. Beyond the traditional Buldoser source environments, additional source environments have been added, including FileNet, Lotus Notes, SharePoint, ApplicationXtender, and eRoom. (For a more detailed review of the current evolved state of the products, reference "The Critical Role of Extract Transform and Load Solutions for Enterprise Content Management" in the Crown resource library at http://www.crownpartners.com/home/login.jsp)
Crown's consistent investment in ETL products is based on the flywheel concept presented in Jim Collins' "Good to Great". Using the concept, Crown's ETL products have gained maturity and momentum through steady, sustained investment over a period of years. Crown has made the investments in much the way one would apply consistent force to accelerate the spin of a heavy flywheel. Like the optimal force applied to a flywheel Crown's investments have been a steady vector, always aligned toward a single direction, always continuing to accelerate the fly wheel.
Most important in the life of Crown's ETL products have been the experience and loyalty of Crown customers. The passion they share for Crown products and their collaborative engagement with Crown has brought the ETL products to the milestone of the five year anniversary of Buldoser's accreditation. The partnership around the ETL products continues, and as more a more customers join in that partnership, the flywheel of these products accelerates from good to great and beyond.
Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com
Posted by Malcolm Bliss on Sun, Mar 01, 2009 @ 07:53 PM
Organizations consolidate diverging and rouge infrastructures to reduce cost and improve efficiency. Infrastructure consolidation is increasingly popular among users of software, and Crown enables those consolidations (see Enabling Consolidation with Universal ETL). Software vendors also need to undertake consolidations. They need to consolidate products and the installed bases of customers for those products.
An example of vendor consolidation from the automotive industry is Ford's acquisition of Jaguar. When Ford acquired Jaguar, it maintained the Jaguar brand and distribution channel, but supplied Jaguar manufacturing with many of the same components that were used across other Ford models, especially Taurus. The idea was to keep serving the same customers, but reduce costs by consolidating the manufacturing.
Like the Ford-Jaguar example, software vendors also need to consolidate products. When Oracle acquired Stellent, it planned to consolidate the Stellent product with its own Oracle Content Data Base. When Open Text acquired Ixos and Humingbird, it planned to consolidate those products into its own Livelink product. FatWire acquired OpenMarket product from Divine with the plan to consolidate with its own products.
In the case of software product consolidations, one product of the two consolidated products is typically considered the strategic product. Customers using the non-strategic product will be required to undergo a conversion to adapt their information to fit the design of the strategic product. To keep customer loyalty and sustain maintenance revenues, vendors need to make that conversion as easy as possible.
Crown's Buldoser technology is commonly used to enable conversions, and can be adapted to perform conversions on a mass scale to convert an installed base of customers. Most recently, Crown has adapted its Buldoser technology to converting the world-wide installed base of EMC's eRoom customers to EMC's strategic product, CenterStage. Crown's technology is the only technology endorsed by EMC for the eRoom to CenterStage conversion. To make the conversion from eRoom to CenterStage as easy as possible, Crown has not only adapted the Buldoser technology, but has also created specialized branding, marketing, product support, professional services and distribution capabilities.
Crown's hybrid software and professional services capabilities are well suited for migration, archiving, and upgrade of individual businesses. The same hybrid software and professional services capabilities wrapped into an integrated program, are well suited to conversion of a large installed base of customers. While Crown possesses unique capabilities for migration, archiving, upgrade, and installed base conversion, Crown is not resting on its laurels. Crown continues to make investments in software technology, professional services, marketing, and support capabilities to allow fluid consolidations on individual-business or installed-base scales. On behalf of the Crown leadership team, we are eager to assist with your conversion needs, large or small.
Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com