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How does migration-center stand out from other migration tools?
Author
Florian Piaszyk-Hensen
Director Products @ fme AG
June 5, 2018
10 reasons why migration-center is first in migration technology!
migration-center is not only a product but rather a content migration platform, which carries out highly automated, large volume migrations without system downtime. It is a 100% out-of-the-box software, fully documented, easy to deploy and needs no additional programming or scripting effort.
The product, which is on the market since 2005, has been certified by leading ECM platform vendors and has proven its quality in thousands of migration projects at more than 450 customers around the world, even in highly regulated environments.
A careful look at current products on the market reveals that most do no more than simply importing documents. Any document and folder reclassification, scalability, reusability and tractability is either absent or of such rudimentary nature, as to severely limit the scope of projects or leading to additional programming at prohibitive costs. fme AG closes this gap in the market and provides a migration product for complex migration scenarios which help customers to reduce cost, manage risk, increase productivity and fasten the go live of ECM applications.
Independent experts and customers confirm that fme offers the most highly developed migration software available anywhere.
1. Performance & Scalability
The migration-center allows the easy organization and processing of large data volumes without interference with daily business operations because all mass operations run in the background. In addition, all components of migration-center are fully scalable within the IT infrastructure and allow fast object load of mass volume. With this architectural concept, migration-center is able to leverage the maximum performance of any source (export) and target (import) system.
Blogpost | System Sizing, Performance & Scalability of migration-center by Vasile Gavrila
2. Successive Delta Migration
Successive delta migration is the secret weapon for migration projects, which do not allow any downtime during the project phase. The product is able execute a migration on live data without effecting the daily business operations of the organization. Users continue to work as usual on ECM systems, even while in the background migration activities are taking place. After the first initial load (initial migration phase), migration-center will automatically pick up any changes of the source repositories and integrate them into the migration process (first delta migration phase). The second delta migration phase is in most projects planned for a weekend, so that the system downtime of only two days affects as little users as possible (See figure “Migration without System Downtime”).
3. Predefined Migration Approach
The typical ETL tools consists of three steps; extract, transform and load. migration-center goes a step beyond and allows the user to follow six migration phases in each project. This approach is based on best practice principles developed over thousands of migration projects and lowers the learning curve.
Looking at the typical migration process with migration-center, it consists six clearly defined steps. First the source data is being analyzed as to type, format, structure, metadata etc. Then the mass of the data is being organized into manageable batches, each containing documents, which can be processed in a similar way, using the same logic. For each batch a set of transformation rules is being created to generate the new structure, metadata etc. Afterwards the transformation rules are simulated and the results are tested and validated against the predefined target object model of the new ECM system. Corrections are being applied and finally the data is being imported into the target system. In fact, migration-center is built exactly that way.
Read more about the six predefined migration steps here.
4. Real-time Simulation and Test
migration-center allows the dynamic simulation and testing of all transformation rules before committing content to repository import, including validation against target object model and automated or manual error handling. Compare to other migration tools in the market, it is not necessary to load millions of objects (documents, folders, etc.) into the target ECM system to review the results of the transformation/migration process. This approach avoid customers from wasting time by loading and roll back millions of objects over and over again because of mistakes during the transformation phase.
5. Metadata Transformation & Reclassification
In practically every migration project there is a need for modifying or creating metadata, changing folder structures, assigning new ALCs etc. If the source of a document is a file share location, for example, information besides system attribute can be extracted from the file name, extension and even the file path of the document and then used to create the metadata needed. Some source metadata may just need to be mapped to a different element on the target system, other may require extensive manipulation or value substitution such as: old document owners are to be replaced; the value list of branch offices has been modified; all documents from project C are now to be assigned to department X and receive also a new access rights classification; depending of the value combination of two input attributes the retention cycle and folder location may be altered.
The migration-center’s rich out-of-the-box command set provides transformation functions for almost any kind of manipulation: text concatenation, substring, split string, value list lookup and substitution, procedure and logic definitions. The value result of one function can be used in another. The user can even create his own individual functions. With migration-center the user has a highly configurable interface to work with on any given document set. He can dynamically view source values and compare them to the results produced by his rules, then correct and refine them until he is satisfied. All of this is done against the migration-center database only, leaving the documents themselves untouched. They continue to be available on their source locations for normal business operations.
6. Flexibility & Reusability
With the enormous set of out-of-the-box features, capabilities and migration paths (see available migration paths here), migration-center is able to cover over 90% of all possible migration requirements. All these features can be easily combined by configuration to achieve any kind of migration objective and the configurations can be reused in other migration projects as well. This flexibility makes migration-center to a real content migration platform for any kind of migration scenarios and help customers to react easily on change requests during the project. In case migration-center is not able to handle migration requirements out-of-the-box, the API and framework enables customer and partners to enhance capabilities (e.g. source or target system connectors) or modify the behavior of product features (e.g. transformation rules) without touching the core elements of the product itself.
7. Unlimited Application Areas
Through its enormous flexibility, the migration-center covers a variety of applications and migration scenarios. Doesn’t matter if you like to migrate to the cloud, consolidate your ECM landscape or simply archive records to an Enterprise Archive, migration-center is the best fit for many different migration plans. The figure blow shows a couple of migration scenarios where migration-center helped customers already.
8. Fit for Regulated Environments (Tractability)
migration-center has been validated and approved by many companies in regulated industries, e.g. international pharmaceutical players. Today we help 90% of the “Top 10” and about 70% of the “Top 30” pharmaceutical companies worldwide to fulfill the challenging demands and become a defacto standard in regulated industries. migration-center has proven the following quality features to cover the expectation of highly regulated environments:
- Robust logging
- Validation of the data before import
- Content integrity check (hash finger print to secure data immutability during the migration process)
- Error detection
- Error logging
- Complete auditability of the migration process
All these features allow to validate and document the whole migration project more effectively and efficiently.
9. Cost Efficiency
migration-center has proven its cost efficiency in many projects and in average our out-of-the-box product is able to save 60% in costs and 80% in project duration time compared to developing custom scripts or using open source frameworks. The example ROI below illustrates in which phases of an ECM project migration-center can help to reduce cost and time compare to a classic scripting approach.
10. Outstanding Product Support
In case of problems with the product but also with the project execution, an outstanding support is one key element of a successful migration project. Since a couple of years our product support reached 100% customer satisfaction and made fme to the company our customers love to work with. Our well-educated support agents answering migration-center related questions, helping users with tipps and tricks or scheduling remote sessions to solve complex problems.
Nevertheless, sometimes customer need some more help to make a migration project successful and for those customers fme provides Professional Migration Services as well. Our Migration Expert Team consists of software developers, project managers, migration specialists and communication experts. Through our best practice methods, short lines of communication and the nearshore fme development center we are able to provide high quality, while always keeping an eye on cost optimization, no matter if you need support in a specific area like project management, or you want someone to take care of the entire migration project.
Summary – Benefits of using migration-center
- No service engagement required
- migration-center is a proven product since 2005 and was used in thousands of projects around the world
- It is a full function, out-of-the-box software, fully documented and easy to deploy
- Product and migration project support available
- NO DOWNTIME – It works without interrupting any normal business operations because of the delta migration capability
- The software is designed to efficiently move and classify large volumes of documents into the chosen target repository (up to 3 million documents per day)
- A large variety of algorithms and commands are available to create a very specific mapping and transformation logic, covering every migration requirement possible and all this without additional programming or scripting effort
- migration-center is able to apply the business logic of highly customized applications (e.g. D2, TBOs, server methods etc.)
- Complete rule simulation and error handling are provided, allowing in depth testing of transformation rules before committing content to the actual repository import
- The migration-center grants more than 220 out-of-the-box connections from various source to various target systems
- migration-center reflects proven migration methodology in its step-by-step processes
- migration-center has been validated and approved by many companies in regulated environments, e.g. international pharmaceutical players
- The migration-center pricing model is simple and very flexible
- Through its enormous flexibility the migration-center may be deployed for a variety of migration scenarios
- With our Professional Migration Services Team we offer customer product training as well as complete implementation by highly competent professionals
- Last but not least, migration-center is much more them a simple ETL tool
