OpenText Migration

System Overview

OpenText is the largest enterprise information management company in the world, offering a broad portfolio of content management, archiving, and business process automation products. The core platform, OpenText Content Suite (formerly Livelink), provides document management, records management, collaboration, and workflow capabilities for large enterprises. Extended ECM integrates content management directly into SAP and other ERP platforms.

The OpenText portfolio also includes Documentum, ApplicationXtender, Archive Center and Archive Server, and Captiva. Each of these products has its own architecture, database schema, and storage model. OpenText is predominantly deployed in large enterprises, particularly those with significant SAP investments including financial services, energy, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals.

Specific Technical Challenges

OpenText's sprawling product portfolio means that a single organization may face multiple distinct migration challenges simultaneously, each with its own architecture.

Proprietary Node-Based Content Structure

Content Suite's Livelink heritage means the content server uses a proprietary node-based structure where every object is a node with a unique DataID. Documents, folders, and workspaces are all nodes, and their relationships are expressed through parent-child node references rather than file system paths.

Bidirectional SAP Extended ECM Links

Extended ECM integration with SAP creates bidirectional links between SAP business objects and Content Suite documents. These links exist in both systems and must be synchronized during migration, or SAP users lose the ability to retrieve linked documents.

Separate WORM Archive Storage

Archive Server stores content in a separate WORM-compliant storage tier that uses its own retrieval mechanism independent of Content Suite. Extracting archived content requires interfacing with the Archive Server directly, not through Content Suite APIs.

Documentum Architecture Divergence

Documentum uses a completely different architecture from Content Suite, with its own Content Server and repository model. Merging the two in an OpenText-to-OpenText consolidation migration is its own challenge, as the data models are fundamentally incompatible.

Non-Portable Report and View Configurations

Custom LiveReports, WebReports, and SmartView configurations are stored as node properties that do not export as standalone configurations. Recreating these in a target system requires manual analysis and rebuilding of each report definition.

Non-Portable Full-Text Index

Full-text index data is stored in a separate OTCS Search engine using SOLR or a legacy search engine. This index is not portable and must be rebuilt from scratch in the target system after document migration is complete.

How Merkh Helps

Precision brings hands-on experience with multiple products in the OpenText portfolio including Content Suite, Documentum, ApplicationXtender, and Archive Server. We understand the data models, APIs, and storage architectures specific to each product and build extraction pipelines that handle them independently or in combination. For Extended ECM environments, we preserve SAP business object linkages so that documents remain accessible from SAP transactions after migration. Across all OpenText products, we produce reconciled output in formats compatible with your target platform.

OpenText Migration Experts