Migration to Open Source ECM Alfresco

Its been a decade I have been working on ECM Alfresco, I have explored all the areas of Alfresco. In this blog I will talk about migration on Alfresco and what need to be checked when planning to migrate. I have done migration projects, from that experience, I realized, why many a times proprietary CMS customer are not able to migrate to open source ECM, Following are the points which stops them like

• Whether Open Source ECM/CMS is reliable and stable.
• Whether ECM/CMS has enough support from the community.
• Whether ECM/CMS is scalable and secured.

For above mentioned points I suggest Alfresco, I have been working on Alfresco since year 2007, From then to now there are immense number features and improvements Alfresco has done, Let’s see few:

• Alfresco improved on quality of features as well as started using latest technologies.
• Alfresco provides platform to developer for ease of extension/customization/configuration.
• Alfresco has architecture level flexibility like UI is decoupled from the repository application.
• Search engine up-gradation from Lucene to Solr to Solr4.
• Alfresco workflow changed from JBPM to Activity.
• Alfresco provided new UI framework Aikau for ease of UI customization/new development.
• Alfresco is more scalable horizontally and vertically.
• New Angular-JS UI is coming-up

So, those were the improvements I talked about, if you want to migrate from existing ECM/CMS to any targeted ECM/CMS then next question you will phase.

What are the points which should be clear before migration from existing CMS to targeted ECM?

• Targeted ECM should be proprietary or Open Source (This point can economize your budget).
• Targeted ECM should provide all the features which are being used in existing CMS.
• Targeted ECM should provide decent list of new features and advantages.
• Targeted ECM should provide stat-of-the art technologies.
• Targeted ECM should provide enough flexibility for customization and extension of existing functionality.
• Targeted ECM should provide better performance and high availability.
• Targeted ECM should provide flexible architecture for integration of third party applications like LDAP, CMIS, Outlook, MS Office Etc.
• Last but not the least cost effective, it may or may not be in terms of current legacy CMS but it should be based on latest CMS which are providing ways of features.

Once all your questions being answered by your selected targeted ECM you are few step behind selecting it.

Now next step could be POC, a small POC should be proof of concept that your basic and main features are available in the targeted ECM/CMS with required scalability, high availability and with capability of migrating small chunk of data from existing CMS.

Once POC is completed then you can check on like if targeted ECM is having your required edition like community or enterprise edition, Community or Enterprise selection it is based on the requirements and budget.

I have been participating on successful migration for customers, for most of the customers Alfresco suited as a best Open Source ECM tool with huge community support.

And it is very important your targeted ECM is attracting Gartner, because Gartner is the world’s leading information technology research company. They research on technologies and publishes their reports on where the specific technology stands. In Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for ECM, Alfresco is named as a challenger

We at EnProwess have done migration for enterprise level customers and We are in a process of draft level of document for migration tool in Alfresco, I will surely share our experience and about tool and I am sure it will help our new upcoming customers who wants to migrate to Alfresco.

Blog by,

Rupesh Sawaliya