The Unique Challenges Of Data Migration And Upgrading A Document Management Solution

A major pharmaceutical company, and long standing Sitrof client, used a very highly customized Documentum WDK Application for content authoring and submission management. While this system served the company well for many years, it ran counter to the company’s IT philosophy of moving to commercial off-the- shelf solutions.

Sitrof was engaged to gather the extensive document, user, configuration and customization migration requirements as well as to perform the design and execution.

This case study discusses the unique challenges such a migration and upgrade effort presents, including:

• Key factors influencing the migration approach ( rolling  vs. an in-place “all-at-once” migration)
  • Rolling Migration is broken up over time to facilitate a gradual, incremental migration.
  • In-Place “All-At-Once” Migration is where all the documents, users, configurations and customizations needed are completed in a single chunk.
• Porting customizations from the legacy system to the upgraded system
  • Sitrof interacted closely with the client Subject matter Experts (SMEs) to determine how to migrate all of the existing documents from the legacy documentation system and map them into the new upgraded FIrstDoc system.
• Ensuring external systems that interfaced with the legacy system continued to work with the new system

Sitrof was involved from inception to the finish of the project, and oversaw a large part of the development and migration efforts that were required for a successful completion of the project