freebsdboy,
You are absolutely correct. Most customers using Alfresco will most likely be migrating documents, metadata, content, etc. from an existing CMS or some form of document management system. My approach was to re-engineer the exported Alfresco Content Package (ACP):
1. Define the content model as needed.
2. Deploy to environment where you can create some test content or upload a document of some kind that would be representative of the migrated content.
3. Do an export of your test data.
4. Review the schema from the XML that was generated from the export.
5. Create a program that can generate an XML that reflects the XML file that was exported.
6. Package into an ACP.
7. Import into Alfresco.
This was not the easiest of solutions, but I think it was a good approach. I wrote a program that generated the XML and other content items. Build a stable repeatable process along the way as it'll require a lot of patience and testing. My ACP file that I used to import worked in various Alfresco Labs 3.0 stack. I was able to package 600 documents in its respective space. Though, 600 was all I had, I believe this approach can be repeated for larger volume.
Best of luck!
