Large organizations rely heavily on rapidly evolving technology to thrive in today’s competitive business environment. And one of these vital solutions is the electronic archiving system, which is expected to maintain a comprehensive and accurate record of customer information such as statements, bills, invoices, insurance policies, scanned images and other organizational information that is essential to the survival and growth of the enterprise. It is critically important for modern organizations that these assets are retained in an efficient and intelligent manner so that they can be retrieved on-demand for customer presentation, compliance, auditing, reporting, etc.
Like all information technology, archive systems too need to be upgraded from time to time. Depending on the requirements of a progressive organization, this could even mean replacing the existing systems with a brand new solution. The first step toward an effective solution, however, is identifying the shortcomings of the current system in the context of your evolving business needs.
Here are a few tell-tale signs that your archiving system hasn’t been keeping up with your growth:
- Waning vendor support – It doesn’t receive enough attention from the vendor in terms of upgrades and support.
- Costly Upgrades – When it becomes prohibitively expensive to boost performance or add new capabilities/features.
- New Media Deficit – The system falls short on receiving and serving up content to the multitude of customer channels, including web, social, mobile, tablet, text, messages, email, and print.
- Social Disconnect – Perhaps the most easily recognizable symptom of an outdated archive system is the inability to connect with social media such as Facebook and Twitter accounts and capture and store customer information.
- Content Inaccessibility – Users complaining of an inability to extract data for targeted messaging, trans-promotional marketing, analytics, and other sales and marketing functions.
- Compliance Infractions – Inability to store or retrieve content that could lead to investigations, fines, license revocations, or lawsuits.
If you can relate to one or more of these issues then upgrading to a more contemporary solution may be the best way forward. An example of archive migrations we have conducted for our customers and have extensive experience in is for the Mobius/ASG-ViewDirect® system. The challenges often highlighted for this system include some of those listed in the points above, as well as other issues typically seen in legacy archive systems, such as a lack of a coherent product roadmap, high costs, and an outdated user experience. Customers are often certain about the need for migration but are unsure about how to move to a new archive without disrupting critical business functions.
The only real roadblock to improved performance then, is the migration itself. The process can be laborious and cumbersome, with key performance factors around the ability to perform complex document migrations on time and within budget, while maintaining access for existing applications, repurposing information locked in legacy document formats and meeting regulatory requirements.
While enterprise IT departments have stringent migration requirements, modernizing your archiving system doesn’t necessarily have to be painful, and OpenText®’s ECM Migration service has a methodology in place to make sure it isn’t. The service provides a way to efficiently migrate content out of legacy archiving systems like Mobius/ASG-ViewDirect® and others to a more contemporary solution such as OpenText’s Output Archive (formerly known as BIRT Repository). Some of the unique benefits of using OpenText’s ECM Migration Service for Mobius migrations include the ability to migrate content out of Mobius without the need to purchase expensive Mobius APIs and the capability to read directly from the underlying file structure using the Mobius Resource Extractor, bypassing the need for Mobius to be running.
Our ECM Migration methodology has been designed keeping best practices gleaned from many successful engagements and utilizes award-winning technologies to automate migration in a lights-out environment without disrupting day-to-day business activities. The ECM Migration team has worked with many ECM systems including IBM® Content Management OnDemand (CMOD), IBM® FileNet® Image Services, IBM®FileNet® P8, ASG-ViewDirect®, and others for decades, and the maturity of our solution proves it. Our technology and DETAIL™ Methodology enables us to:
- Manage all aspects of a migration
- Cut up to 6 weeks off of the initial planning
- Use standard logging on a single platform
- Provide multi-threaded support out-of-the-box
- Implement process flows, advanced logic and routers through drag-and-drop interfaces without the need for scripting
- Connect to and pool the connection with multiple databases and repositories
- Run processes concurrently, by thread or broken down by stage (i.e. Load, Extract, Convert)
- Handle massive volumes of data, documents, images and metadata
So, if you think it’s time to say goodbye to your current archiving system, know that there are experts out there who can help you define your requirements and deploy an appropriate solution that will take you where you want to go. And remember – organizations that evolve, thrive. Others perish.
