Oracle IPM 10g and Imaging 11g Migration

One of the things we’ve done a lot of here at ImageSource are migrations. It’s definitely one our core competencies. For a little more information on our approach to migrations, you can review my earlier post here. Lately, migrations have been more focused because the majority of them involve moving content out of the Oracle IPM 10g or Oracle Imaging 11g products. Oracle IPM 10g has reached end-of-life, and Oracle Imaging 11g was the terminal release of the product, so essentially that product line is dead. The IPM 10g product was something we worked with for many years, so we have a wealth of knowledge on its “ins and outs.” IPM was a feature-rich, but older, product stack, and it was in need of a rewrite. However, when Oracle rewrote the product as Imaging 11g, there were a lot of key and important features that didn’t make the cut.

Because of everything I’ve mentioned, businesses running on these particular Oracle ECM platforms have had to make decisions for their long term ECM vision or roadmap. I have worked with a number of clients on technology evaluations and like to help determine their roadmap, but that’s a blog post for another time. One of the key pieces to any ECM roadmap for a company performing  these ECM solution changes is the migration of their content from the systems that they are replacing. Luckily we have ILINX Export and ILINX Import to make these migrations straightforward as possible.

There are a number of options with ILINX Export, but in short we use it to export all content and metadata out of a source system for migration into any destination system. By default, ILINX Export retrieves the content from the source system in exactly the same format it was in when it was added to the original system. By exporting the content out in its native format, a customer can keep a copy of the original data, and any data manipulation or file conversions can be done downstream. ILINX Export does have the ability to convert files to PDF, but we generally recommend image conversion when importing the content into the destination system. Utilizing our knowledge of Oracle ECM, there are plenty of options when extracting the content from these products. For example:

  • Only migrate certain applications.
  • Only migrate content created after, or before, a certain date.
  • Only migrate the content that falls within certain criteria: i.e., specific business unit, a set of document types, or virtually any criteria that can be identified with the content metadata.
  • Split the content up so content that meets certain criteria goes to one destination, and content meeting other criteria goes elsewhere.
  • Retain the IPM, or Imaging, annotations. These can be flattened into the documents, but I only recommended that in certain instances. If the client is migrating to ILINX Content Store, we can migrate the annotations as an overlay into the new ILINX system.
  • There are many options for formatting the data when it its exported from the source system. ILINX Export can output the metadata to text or XML files with complete control of the format, delimiter, field order, layout, and size of those files. That flexibility allows for the creation of input files in a format that can work for just about any destination system.
  • The metadata can also be written directly to SQL to support long term storage or manipulation if necessary.
  • Schedule the export to run during off-hours to keep the load off the servers while clients are using the old system.
  • Detailed auditing of the entire process to help with reporting, compliance and troubleshooting.
  • Many more.

Once you’ve defined all the rules surrounding the migration and started execution, the next step is importing that content and metadata to the destination ECM system. For that, we use our ILINX Import product which I’ll cover in a later post. If you have any questions about ILINX Export, reach out to us for a demo or discussion.

John Linehan
Sr. Systems Engineer
ImageSource, Inc.