Merry Christmas and Happy 2023
Athento wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2023, we hope that together we will continue creating wonderful things in the New Year!
Any document management project goes through a series of phases that are more or less difficult, depending on the capacity of the implemented product and the experience of the team that sets it in motion.
Throughout our more than 10 years of experience specialising in helping our clients with their document management problems, at Athento, we have found that one of the most critical steps when implementing a document management system (DMS) or an ECM software platform is the migration of the documents and their metadata.
On this matter, we come across different situations:
1. The client already has a document management system implemented.
2. The client does not have a DMS or ECM, but has the documents or their metadata in files within a shared file system or spreadsheets with their metadata.
Based on our experience, the first situation is certainly the more complicated one, though it may seem quite the opposite. This is because it is necessary to ensure backward compatibility of everything there is. That’s to say, we have to ensure that the client can continue to access their old data—without losing information—from the new tool.
To migrate documents to a ECM platform, a series of key tasks must be done:
1.- An initial analysis to assess the situation of the documentation, what metadata it has, the format of the original files, and the volume of documentation.
On this point, it is key to carry out the analysis as if it were a business intelligence project. It is necessary to obtain information on the volume of documents from different perspectives: by document type, by location, by author, and by date. This makes the subsequent quality process easier. Afterwards, we can check using different means that all of the information has been migrated, as the volume indicated in the analysis will coincide the volume in the new software. Likewise, it is necessary to have “master tables” that are used to feed information into the document metadata, especially if some type of transformation of this data will be done afterwards.
2.- The design and development of the migration scripts, which will be in charge of completing the following operations:
3.- The design and development of the scripts that will measure the quality of this migration.
4.- Necessary measures must be taken to control the speed of the migration, the transformation of metadata, and quality processes. Normally, all projects have a tight deadline. In large migration processes, this becomes even more critical. The migration of 2 million documents can last for a minimum of 4 weeks, depending as always on the available infrastructure. Network speeds and disc reading and writing speeds are key in this process.
5.- Quality testing in “UAT” mode.
Other considerations of interest when it comes to migrating a document management system are:
I hope this post helps all of you who are considering migrating documents to a new system. Although migrations are complex, by following best practices like what we have outlined above, we can carry it out successfully and within the estimated time frame.
Athento wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2023, we hope that together we will continue creating wonderful things in the New Year!
Athento increases its level of support to the Django Software Foundation, becoming a Silver donor. The collaboration of all donors allows to maintain the project and supports its evolution.
During the last few weeks of February 2022, we migrated our product to Python 3.7 and Django 3.2. It was a hard road, but it made us grow professionally and gave us deep knowledge of these technologies that we would like to share with you.