Computer Science Corp. Implements An In-Place, All-At-Once System Migration To FirstDoc

A major pharmaceutical company, and long standing Sitrof client, used a very highly customized Documentum WDK Application for content authoring and submission management. While this system served the company well for many years, it ran counter to the company’s IT philosophy of moving to Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) solutions.

Computer Science Corporation (CSC) was contracted to perform application requirements gathering, production configuration and installation. Sitrof was engaged to perform the extensive document, user, configuration and customization migration requirements gathering, design and execution.

This case study discusses the unique challenges such a migration and upgrade effort presents including:

• Key factors influencing the migration approach ( rolling vs. an in-place “all-at-once” migration)
• Porting customizations from the legacy system to the upgraded system
• Ensuring external systems that interfaced with the legacy system continued to work with the new system

In-Place All-At-Once Migration 

An “All-At-Once” migration is where all the documents, users, configurations and customizations necessary for a complete migration are done in a single chunk usually over an extended weekend.

An in-place upgrade is one where an upgrade to the existing software is done instead of migration to a new system with the new software. An advantage of this approach from a Documentum perspective is that the unique object identifiers are left intact whereas a rolling migration would require that the object identifiers change.