Exit Strategy for Alfresco

[joedarlo]

Afternoon All,

I am relatively new to Alfresco but I have carried out a number of system installs to enable document management. My question is if in the event that I wanted to switch from Alfresco to another system be it open source or other what would be the main issues ?

What I am trying to understand is the complexity of exporting firstly all of the data but then also all of the metadata and supporting information that is attributed to any one file. I am not unfortunately an architecture or data base specialist so I would appreciate any advice from those of you that are on how easy it is to extract your documents and use them in an alternative system……

If anyone knows of any articles or has any experience of this I would very much like to learn about this.

Very Best Regards,

J

[bengrah]

I'm not in infrastructure on anything like that but from working on Alfresco for a while I can describe some of the things I've picked up.

I'm not sure it'd be so easy to migrate from one CMS to another, since Alfresco probably has many differences between other CMS. And that's really the key issue here is that Alfresco has its way of doing things, and other CMS have their way of doing things. Alfresco may be one of many open source CMS solutions, but that doesn't mean they're all the same.

For example

You have data sitting in your data store that is taken the form of a .bin file,  do any other document management systems write and read data as a bin file?

Exporting data may require some heavy duty tools, and there's nothing I've heard of in Alfresco yet that can export all your data in once place for you to do whatever with?

Does the Alfresco system append any data to the bin file which makes it more usable for itself?

The metadata associated with each piece of content is stored in the database, which may not necessarily be that useful since other CMS may have different ideas about what actually constitutes metadata

Even then, a new CMS may have a different file structure, making most of your location data for content redundant

Those are just some of the things that come to mind anyway. I may be completely wrong on the subject however! But these are some of the things I think have an impact anyway, so hope that helps.

[mrogers]

The internal format that alfresco (or any other CMS for that matter) should not concern you.    Alfresco provides a large set of interfaces and you should use those to export your data rather than by attempting to read the database and content store directly.

For example a cheap and cheerful way of exporting the content is simply to ftp the bits you want out.    Equally you can get any relevant metadata with a script.

The harder issues will be if you want to change your data model, note I said your data model.   The same problem will apply to any system, not just alfresco.   And that problem requires analysis and thought before selecting tools.