Last time we spoke, I started to talk about the issue we are seeing when organisations want to move to a more modern or fully integrated ECM (enterprise content management) solution but struggle with all the legacy content and variety of data formats they want to preserve, as these form a kind of corporate memory.

There are a number of professional services firms that can help, but what we would say to a customer facing this issue is to look to working with a company like ours that has specific technology and product to help. Let me explain.

For a start, we can quickly help you transform older data into a format which can be displayed in your new system. Typically, that encompasses converting such content into a PDF or an image so you can expect to easily navigate through your preserved content in more of a visual way.

We can also offer you a set of services to take you through the data analysis. In fact, once we have analysed the data, we’d work with you to either develop specific tools to extract the content (if need be we may need to develop some new ones) though in most cases we can usually get around it by using our existing tool set. (This is where our ConXLoader tool comes to the fore; it comes to you with a set of already on-boarded migration services, basically.)

We can then go further into the process of extraction of data, the mapping of that to the target data structure, and any formatting or reformatting of content that is required. Think of a series of iterations where we take bite-size chunks to work out exactly what is the most appropriate process for getting the data out from the source and into the target and then turn those bite-size chunks into slightly larger ‘plates of food’, so that we can take it into a test environment, that will wrap around an application which is developed… I hope you see the process here, and agree it is pretty rigorous and fool-proof.

And it works in real life – with one NHS customer we migrated approximately 100,000 patient records from their existing system into Documentum using ConXLoader, while with a very large well-known retailer we migrated roughly 6 million invoice records out of a proprietary system into a new SAP platform. Plus we are in the process of working with a central government agency with around 5 million records at Impact Level 3 (IL3) to move to a new system too.

To sum up on this crucial ECM issue of well-structured content migration service projects, my experience with customers convinces me there are a number of things we can help you with:

• Confidence that your legacy data will be preserved (Who likes to lose anything – especially if it is of value?)
• Enhancing of the data’s value; a great side effect of a good ECM data migration process is enabling you to find information much more easily and readily
• The process of being able to search and retrieve information
• Instant access, or instant visualisation – by which I am thinking of the ability to see previews of your information once it has been migrated.

We’d love to talk to you to see if you agree we can do all this for you!

In any case, best of luck with your data migration journey – may it be less hassle than it too often can be.