Initial Situation
The global insurance company hosts multiple EMC Documentum deployments. Currently, they have more than 3,000 Documentum users, 25 Documentum applications, 6 repositories and about 17 million documents stored in it. They have been using Documentum 6.5 SP2 in four different staging environments (Development, Test, QA and Production). Since EMC’s standard support for 6.5 ended in July 2012, the company was paying for extended support which is limited to August 2015. The growing Documentum infrastructure as well as new project demands further increased the need for implementing the new version of the Documentum platform to benefit from the performance improvements as well as from the support of new client technologies.
Project Goals
The major driver to upgrade from Documentum 6.5 SP2 to D7 was to save costs for extended support and provide a longterm document management solution with a fully supported environment. Furthermore, the intention was to leverage the new functionalities and technologies of D7 like xCP 2.x or D2 4.x to provide the highest amount of usability for its employees and to fulfil the new client requirements. During this upgrade all applications had to be upgraded to the new platform without major downtimes. Before upgrading to Documentum D7 it was necessary to rearchitect the whole platform without breaking the interoperability of consuming applications to improve performance, scalability and liability of the system.
Solution Delivered
fme and their customer were working closely together to complete this initiative within given time constraints. The major sub projects can be summarized as the following:
- Architecture design and setup on new hardware with high availability where possible (for example for Content Server, DMS and Application Server
- Per Repository (handled one-by-one)
- Database and Hardware Switch
- Repository In-Place Upgrade
- Application Upgrade(s) – DFS, WDK, D2
- DMS and BOCS configuration where needed
- ADTS configuration where needed
- xPlore configuration where needed
- D2 4.1 setup where needed
- Additional components as needed
- Cutover in agreed weekend time windows with limited downtime
- Legacy Data Migration of custom database application with about 5 million documents into new D7 environment using fme’s product migration-center
As part of this initiative fme and the insurance company also jointly participated in the D7 Rapid Success Program (RSP) from EMC which greatly helped to resolve issues and answer questions within a short timeframe.
Outlook
In the near future it is planned to upgrade the D2 backend to D2 4.x because this offers mobile access to Documentum and secures future support. Furthermore an upgrade to xCP 2.x will improve the user interface and support faster configuration and development of new workflow apps. An additional benefit is that extended support will be avoided.
migration-center Quickfacts
migration-center represents the first of a new breed of 2nd generation migration software, which carries out highly automated, large volume document migrations without interrupting any of your normal business operations. It has the power to efficiently classify objects through extensible algorithms with no additional programming or scripting effort needed. migration-center is certified for more than nine years by leading ECM vendors, a mark of quality and value that customers insist on in enterprise applications and is one of the most deployed migration software products. More than 130 migration projects worldwide and a global service presence account for migration-center’s leading position. To the customers belong renowned companies around the world like Audi, Boehringer Ingelheim, Areva, DSM, MedImmune, Merck, GenRe, GlaxoSmithKline or Volkswagen.
Technology
- Documentum Content Server 7.0
- DMS and BOCS 7.0
- xPlore 1.2
- ADTS 6.7 SP2
- Webtop 6.7 SP2
- DFS 7.0
- D2 4.1
- xCP 1.x
- fme migration-center