Data Migration for ECM Deployments

Enterprise content management (ECM) systems capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver an organization’s unstructured content and documents related to organizational processes.

Most large organizations have hundreds of millions of pieces of unstructured data scattered across many different and distributed systems all around the world. According to Forrester Research, only 5% of this information is organized, leaving the remaining 95% without any means of easy identification or access.

An ECM system is only as good as the information that’s stored in it. Therefore, in order to successfully implement an ECM system it’s critical to ensure that all and only the right data is migrated into it. Furthermore, once migrated the data needs to be organized so that it services the specific business needs of the organization.

The Challenge of Data Migration for ECM

There are currently two ways to find, select, map, migrate, and then organize data in a meaningful business-oriented structure within the ECM system: manually and using ECM crawlers to automate the proces.

Attempting to perform the data migration process manually is clearly destined for failure. The time, cost and effort needed to manually select, migrate, organize and maintain the sheer quantity of data in an ECM system is prohibitive. And even if it were possible, the process is completely subjective and therefore highly inaccurate and inconsistent.

ECM crawlers do inject some level of automation into the process, however, they typically make their decisions based on file location and metadata, both of which do not necessarily indicate the actual content and context of the data. ECM crawlers do not evaluate data based on content, and therefore they cannot organize the data in the ECM system based on a business structure. Furthermore, the configuration and maintenance of ECM crawlers is extremely complex and time consuming.

The end result is that there is currently no way to automatically and centrally locate and accurately identify all the data across the organization that needs migrating into the ECM system, and then organize this data in a meaningful business-oriented structure within the system.  Without the ability to do this ECM systems will be ineffective and fail to deliver ROI.

AccessLogic for Effective Data Migration for ECM

AccessLogic is a fully-automated information management system for data migration. AccessLogic automatically identifies and structures all content, and then files it consistently by its business context. This gives users an easy and accurate way to locate all information across the organization that requires migration. Once identified, users can define migration policies for this data including default locations and hierarchies based on business context. AccessLogic then automatically migrates existing and future data into the pre-defined locations based on the pre-defined policies - without the need for any administration or user intervention.

AccessLogic enables effective data migration for ECM deployments:

• Automatically identifies all content and then structures it consistently by its business context
• Simplifies the complexity and cuts the time and effort needed to manage migration policies by enabling users to define policies based on the content’s business context
• Automatically builds, manages and maintains migration policies on huge volumes of data 
• Applies polices coherently and accurately across the all current and future information