6-week migration game plan: Moving on IBM FileNet’s legacy solution

Determine user interface, content and security models

The first part of the project was to analyze how the client was currently using FileNet. For many clients, given the age of the FileNet system, the IT staff has inherited ownership of the system and might not know of all the different uses and document types.

For this client, the focus was on HR and tracking of employee and applicant documents.

Leveraging an Agile methodology, Managed Services was able to quickly demonstrate to the client how the new interface would work with their current documents migrated from FileNet, as well as highlight key features that would provide an improved customer experience and additional user capabilities.

As a first phase of the project, the client prioritized moving existing functionality, content model and security to the new ECM system and interface.

This approach allowed the team to postpone the analysis of other ECM processes and capabilities until a later phase to more quickly retire the FileNet system.

Managed Services best practices: The phased approach

To quickly move from a legacy FileNet system, target a first phase that prioritizes moving existing capabilities, and postpone additional business process automation or other enhancements to later phases.

Begin FileNet extraction early

One of the major challenges with any FileNet migration, particularly for a system that still leverages optical discs, is the extraction of the documents from the optical discs/jukeboxes.

Multiple factors can influence how quickly FileNet documents can be accessed, including:

• Size, age and maintenance of FileNet’s relational database: Legacy databases that have been poorly maintained cannot always be accessed in a batch mode as efficiently as required for a bulk migration.
• Daily usage clash: Most production clients want to minimize existing system conflict and work to avoid scheduling migrations when performance (or any system interruption) would impact current FileNet users.
• Old hardware and software: Many legacy FileNet implementations run on hardware and operating systems that are extremely slow by today’s standards.
• Legacy storage: Often, old optical disc hardware (drives) have become unreliable and jukeboxes only have one or two drives that still work to even support the migration.

Managed Services best practices: Two-step migration

To quickly move from a legacy FileNet system, execute a two-step migration approach that gradually dumps the FileNet content to a temporary storage area over time. This avoids conflicts with existing FileNet production use.

Due to these risks with retrieval as part of a migration, Managed Services typically recommends a “two-step” migration approach. For this approach:

• Documents and their metadata are extracted from FileNet and placed in a temporary storage area defined by the client. Documents are usually extracted in nightly “non-production” runs that focus on retrieving all images from each disc, one at a time, to reduce conflict with FileNet users.
• Documents are imported into the new ECM system, generally once all of the FileNet extracts are complete.

The above two-step approach allows the FileNet export to proceed in parallel with the new ECM system set-up, configuration and testing.

It also guarantees that each image will only need to be extracted from FileNet one time and still allow for multiple iterations of migrations to the new ECM system if necessary.

For clients considering moving into the cloud, most vendors provide a hardware device for storing the documents and their metadata to allow the extracted content to be shipped to the cloud vendor and downloaded to cloud storage, eliminating the need to push the content to the cloud over an internet connection.

For example, Amazon provides a petabyte-scale hardware solution known as Snowball for bulk data transfer to AWS.

Remove, stash or archive stale documents

After 15 to 20 (or more) years of usage, many times different business processes or document types were added to the system only to be discontinued at a later time. Clients have a few options when looking at old, discontinued document types:

1. Remove these documents from the migration jobs and essentially delete them.
2. Move these documents to a temporary “archive” location and determine whether to delete or retain after the FileNet migration.
3. Analyze how the documents were used to build new interfaces/ use cases. This can be as simple as importing them into the new system as a “legacy archive” document type, where they will be available if needed but will not clutter the user experience.

Rather than research why old document types once existed, this client decided to move all old document types to a “legacy archive” portion of the new ECM system.

Managed Services best practices: Ditch stale docs

To quickly move from a legacy FileNet system, don’t waste too much time on document types that have not been utilized in quite some time. Consider either removing these documents from the migration, stashing them for later analysis, or moving them to an archive area of the new ECM system.

Update multi-page TIFF to single-document PDF

One legacy component of older image management systems was the reliance on TIFF (tagged image file format) as a means of storage and viewing.

Modern ECM systems have moved to the PDF (portable document format) as a standard for document viewing. PDF has several advantages over TIFF including:

• TIFF (and FileNet’s proprietary version of TIFF) would require special viewing applications and annotation capabilities. As an industry standard, many browsers, web applications and frameworks support PDF documents natively (e.g., Gmail, PDF.js). In addition, PDF has a standard for annotations, XFDF
• Legacy systems, including FileNet, stored TIFFs as separate, single-page files that the viewer interface had to stitch together, making viewing slow (e.g., flipping between page views) and printing difficult. Multi-page PDF documents have performance as well as printing advantages. Modern ECM systems typically expect all pages of a document to be stored as a single file
• ECM vendors have found that converting Word, Excel and other common types of files directly to PDF has size and font advantages not found in TIFF
• PDF can support both image and text formats and allow for OCR results to be embedded behind the image. Many modern scanning systems can “read” the text in a document after it has been scanned. They store this text in the PDF file in addition to the original image, and users can look at either (or both) versions. Text PDF documents allow text searching capabilities
• PDF is supported on virtually every modern computing device, both desktop and mobile

For our client, Hyland’s Managed Services was able to use our OpenMigrate offering’s capabilities to convert multiple TIFF images to single document PDF files as part of the migration.

Managed Services best practices: Convert to PDF

To quickly move from a legacy FileNet system, convert all TIFF images to PDF documents.

Aim for initial “out of the box” modern ecm implementation

When many clients were first implementing FileNet, one of the major customizations was to create a custom search and retrieval interface with integration into existing systems.

With modern ECM systems built to provide user customizations via configuration, a recommended first step would be to leverage the existing configurations as much as possible to avoid costly and time-consuming customizations and integrations. 

For our client, the ability to configure HPI without any customizations dramatically accelerated the approval of the interface and reduced the cost of implementation. 

Regarding integrations into other systems, HPI was able to tie into an existing database rather than have to build new integrations.

Managed Services best practices: OOTB interface

To quickly move from a legacy FileNet system, start with a simple, configured interface rather than adding custom development.