EMC Documentum upgrade migration

Customer Challenge

Over the years our client – Gedeon Richter piled up a massive amount of various medicine descriptions, patient information leaflet texts, research documentations, and other documents containing medical and client information all written in various languages, since Gedeon Richter operates in 38 countries. All this data was stored in an aging EMC Documentum repository (version 5.2)which was not systematically upgraded over the years so when they finally decided to migrate to the newest version of EMC Documentum (version 6.7) the version gap was so big, that the upgrade, using the tools provided by EMC could only be done with multiple, complex migrations. These migrations would last for weeks or even months resulting in significant business downtime. The various character encoding proved to be an additional challenge, that the vendor could not solve properly.

The following requirements were defined by the client:

  • Clean up and migrate all relevant content from EMC Documentum 5.2 to 6.7
  • Maintain the hierarchy of the virtual documents
  • Preserve metadata (system attributes inducing modification dates)
  • Set the character encoding of the data according to the target system
  • Fix and refresh links in the source system, to work in the target system
  • Preserve the hierarchy system of the objects
  • System should not be stopped during workdays

Solution – Migration with MPS Voyager

First using our MPS Voyager ECM toolkit we cleaned up all the data stored in the source system was analyzed and cleaned-up. Next all relevant data was copied to an additional repository. This allowed the original source system to be used for the whole time of the initial migration process. Then from this additional repository all content was migrated with all its attributes to the target EMC Documentum repository. The huge version jump from 5.2 to 6.7 was easily managed, due to the huge arsenal of ready-to-use connectors to popular ECM systems including EMC Documentum. After a successful testing and validation (by Multipass and by Richter) a second, delta migration took place, during which all the changes to the original repository were also synchronized with the target repository. This meant no real business downtime, since only the delta migration suspended work and only for several hours during a weekend.

Detailed migration process:

  1. Users, groups, ACLs copied to the target system.
  2. Creation of the folder structure in the target system.
  3. Migration of the documents, copying the contents, attributes, metadata
  4. Building up virtual documents
  5. Setting up the relations
  6. Migration of renditions
  7. Setting up ACLs, life cycles and modification dates
  8. Validation and testing
  9. Delta migration of all changes made to the original source repository during the main migration

Objects to migrate:

  • Audit records (5 616 238)
  • ACLs (app. 691 000 system ACLs)
  • Users (app. 450)
  • Groups (29)
  • Cabinets (16)
  • Relations (app. 40 000)
  • Renditions (app. 22 600)
  • Life Cycles (55 applied for 1 200 000 documents)
  • Folders (app. 250 000)
  • Documents (app. 1 731 000, 78 various types)
  • Virtual document versions (429 160)

Results

  • 8.8M objects (620+ GB) migrated from EMC Documentum 5.2 to EMC Documentum 6.5
  • Cleaning the data, highlighting and fixing inconsistencies
  • Migration done in 4 days, no business downtime during the main migration
  • Delta migration done in less than 14 hours
  • Migration of all relevant attributes and metadata
  • Solving the collation issues (character encoding problems)

About Gedeon Richter

Headquartered in Hungary, Gedeon Richter is a Pan-European pharmaceutical company established in Hungary in 1901 with more than 11000 employees worldwide. Gedeon Richter’s R&D base, which employs 1000 people, makes the company the most important pharmaceutical research center in Central Eastern Europe. The Hungarian HQ’s activities of pharmacy research and development, manufacturing and sales are supported by several subsidiaries, joint ventures and other affiliates. The company is present in 38 countries with five production sites, 29 representative offices and 27 commercial subsidiaries. Besides its well-established sales network in Hungary, Central Eastern Europe and CIS countries, Richter has also set up its medical sales representative and marketing network in Western Europe to support the company’s female healthcare portfolio.