Everywhere you look, companies that produce high volumes of forms and documents are migrating from an on-premise high-volume business document composition system to a cloud-based solution like DocOrigin Cloud from Eclipse. Eclipse serves many customers who are quite satisfied with the legacy version of DocOrigin, which we continue to support and improve. But for many, the savings, efficiency, and flexibility that an online solution provides are a better match for the organization’s vision of the future.
If your company is considering a move to an online document environment, moving from one platform to another requires careful planning. In this overview article, we discuss some key steps to ensure a smooth transition.
For more details about the benefits of transitioning to a cloud-based document composition solution, see our articles “Scalable Solutions for Mass Document Creation”, “What to Expect from Your Cloud-Based CCM Platform”, and “Document Composition in the Cloud”.
Conduct a thorough inventory of your document composition system, including hardware, software, and configurations. Identify all the data sources, catalog your document templates, and analyze your workflows. Understand your organization’s technical limitations, identify data dependencies, and categorize documents based on function, sensitivity, and business importance.
In the course of your research, you may encounter obsolete documents or applications. Removing them from the migration plan will save time and money. In our experience, most organizations also discover duplicate documents or multiple versions. Take the time to refresh and consolidate your document inventory to avoid transferring unnecessary assets to the new cloud-based platform.
Review the format of your data, documents, and reports, which may include legacy data structures or documents designed for specific output devices.
Study performance under the current system. Estimate future workloads and set targets for improved performance.
Evaluate any risks involved in migrating to the cloud, including performance concerns and privacy issues. Modern cloud-based platforms encrypt data and store it in redundant data repositories, but you should be prepared to address any concerns from internal customers, external customers, or regulatory bodies.
Define your objectives for cloud migration. What do you want to accomplish? How will this transition support broader business goals and strategies for your organization? Will any applications remain on the old platform, or are you planning a complete replacement?
Compare the new cloud-based document composition platform to your existing workflows. What will you have to change? Who on your staff will need training? Will you need to address data transformation or cleansing for compatibility with the new environment? Pay close attention to proprietary print streams like Postscript or PCL to determine if you’ll need to convert to cloud-friendly formats like PDF or HTML to take advantage of all the features of the new document management platform.
Make sure the cloud-based system conforms to your industry’s regulatory requirements for document handling, storage, and retrieval. Most modern systems feature all the necessary elements that track and protect data and documents, but it pays to confirm you won’t have any issues with the regulators. Some areas of information and document governance include data retention and disposition, access controls, legal discovery, audit trails, and reporting.
Define roles and responsibilities for migration team members and set up a communication/collaboration framework to coordinate the team’s activities. Create a schedule along with target dates for specific project milestones.
Pilot migrations are an excellent strategy that allows for a controlled transition. You can minimize risks and make sure the new document management system meets all your needs. Select a set of associated documents that you can safely test without disrupting daily production. Set up a staging environment to simulate actual conditions and run tests to check document quality, workflow integrity, dependencies, performance, and configurations.
At Eclipse, our trainers will often work with your team to help you develop the pilot application. Once your staff is comfortable with the software, we fall back into a support role. We’ll be ready to answer questions or guide you through new features or techniques that apply to other document types and your internal workflows.
In a recent installation, we jointly selected a customer document to convert and used it as the training material. Once we finished, the customer was ready to tackle their remaining documents on their own, simply calling with questions as they arose.
Be sure to specify a roll-back plan if unforeseen circumstances make it necessary to take a step back and do more pre-migration work before resuming the pilot program. Make sure that the backup data archives are accessible and functional.
After successful tests, use the lessons learned from the pilot phase to streamline the broader migration effort. Continue testing each new document or application as you migrate them to the cloud-based document management platform.
DocOrigin Cloud is a top-tier, cloud-based document generation platform from Eclipse Corporation. It empowers businesses of all sizes to create, customize, and distribute documents directly from managed servers powered by Oracle Cloud.
DocOrigin Cloud simplifies the process of document management, with tools for designing and issuing transactional documents, from invoices and purchase orders to contracts and shipping documents.
In this article, the most prominent keywords include migration strategy, testing, pilot migrations, document management system, staging environment, training, roll-back plan, backup archives, cloud-based platform, and DocOrigin Cloud. These concepts collectively highlight the essential elements involved in planning, executing, and supporting a successful transition to a modern, cloud-powered document management solution.