How to Migrate to Alfresco Enterprise: Step-by-Step ChecklistMigrating to Alfresco Enterprise can significantly improve your organization’s content management capabilities — offering better scalability, security, support, and enterprise-grade features. This step-by-step checklist walks you through planning, preparation, execution, and post-migration tasks to ensure a smooth transition with minimal disruption.
Before you begin: key decisions and preparation
- Define goals and scope
- Identify why you’re migrating (support, features, performance, compliance).
- Decide which repositories, sites, users, and customizations will move.
- Set success criteria (e.g., data integrity, downtime limits, performance targets).
- Stakeholders & team
- Form a migration team: project manager, Alfresco architect, sysadmins, DBAs, security lead, QA, and business representatives.
- Assign roles for decision-making, approvals, and rollback authority.
- Inventory & audit
- Inventory repositories, document volumes, content types, rules, workflows, integrations, custom extensions, and third-party connectors.
- Audit content for duplicates, obsolete items, and PII/sensitive data that may require special handling.
- Licensing & environment choices
- Ensure you have the correct Alfresco Enterprise licenses.
- Choose target architecture: single node vs. clustered, on-premises vs. cloud vs. hybrid.
- Decide on supporting components: PostgreSQL/Oracle/MSSQL, Solr/Elasticsearch, LDAP/SSO, load balancers, object storage.
- Compliance & security planning
- Review regulatory requirements (retention, access controls, encryption).
- Plan encryption at rest, transport (TLS), and key management.
- Plan user and group mapping (LDAP/AD sync, SSO configuration).
- Migration strategy & timeline
- Choose migration approach: lift-and-shift, phased, incremental, or parallel-run (run both systems simultaneously).
- Decide acceptable downtime and cutover date/time windows.
- Create rollback and contingency plans.
Pre-migration tasks
- Set up target Alfresco Enterprise environment
- Provision infrastructure (servers, storage, networking).
- Install Alfresco Enterprise with the desired topology (clustered for high availability if needed).
- Configure supporting services: database, search (Solr/Elasticsearch), caching, SMTP.
- Recreate configuration & customizations
- Inventory custom Alfresco modules (AMP/JARs), models, behaviors, actions, and web scripts.
- Refactor or update custom code for compatibility with the target Alfresco Enterprise version.
- Deploy and test customizations in a staging environment.
- User, group & permission mapping
- Map existing users and groups to the target authentication system (AD/LDAP/SSO).
- Recreate group hierarchies and permission templates.
- Test role-based access and permission inheritance in staging.
- Data cleansing & archival
- Remove redundant or obsolete files.
- Archive cold content to cheaper storage if retention policies allow.
- Scan and mask or restrict PII/regulated data.
- Develop migration tooling & scripts
- Choose tools: Alfresco’s built-in import/export, CMIS-based scripts, Alfresco Bulk Import Tool, rsync for binaries, or custom ETL scripts.
- Create scripts to migrate metadata, version history, permissions, and aspects.
- Ensure migration preserves content UUIDs if references depend on them.
- Testing plan
- Define functional, performance, security, and user acceptance test (UAT) cases.
- Prepare test data sets representative of production scale.
- Plan a dry run or pilot migration.
Migration execution — step-by-step
- Pilot migration (small subset)
- Migrate a representative sample: one site, department, or content type.
- Validate content integrity, metadata, permissions, versions, and search indexing.
- Collect feedback and adjust migration scripts and procedures.
- Full migration—pre-cutover checklist
- Notify stakeholders and users about scheduled downtime or read-only windows.
- Ensure backups of source systems and target staging environments are fresh and verifiable.
- Put source repository into read-only mode if possible (to prevent changes during migration).
- Disable scheduled jobs or integrations that could modify content during migration.
- Data migration
- Migrate binaries and content store files to the target content store (ensure paths and storage IDs match or are remapped).
- Migrate metadata, associations, aspects, and version history via CMIS or Alfresco tools.
- Recreate custom properties and ensure their values are preserved.
- Migrate permissions, ownerships, and access control lists (ACLs).
- Search & indexing
- Rebuild search indexes on the target (Solr/Elasticsearch).
- Validate that search results match expected content and metadata.
- Tune analyzers and schema settings for language, stemming, and tokenization as needed.
- Integrations & connectors
- Reconfigure and test integrations: LDAP/AD sync, SSO, email, backup agents, archive hooks, external workflows, and other third-party systems.
- Verify connectors for network shares, ECM sync clients, and mobile apps.
- Performance verification
- Execute performance tests to validate throughput, concurrency, and response times.
- Monitor memory, CPU, I/O, and database performance; tune JVM, database parameters, and Solr/Elasticsearch settings.
- Cutover
- Final sync: re-run an incremental migration to capture changes since the initial migration window.
- Switch DNS/load balancers or reroute users to the target Alfresco Enterprise system.
- Re-enable scheduled jobs and integrations.
- Monitor closely for errors and user reports.
Post-migration validation and stabilization
- Functional validation
- Run UAT scripts and confirm workflows, rules, and actions behave correctly.
- Verify that metadata, version history, and permissions are intact.
- Confirm content previews, thumbnails, renditions, and transformations work.
- Security & compliance checks
- Validate encryption at rest and transport, access logs, and audit trails.
- Confirm retention and legal hold policies are enforced.
- Run vulnerability scans and configuration hardening checks.
- Backup & DR
- Configure and test backup procedures, snapshot schedules, and restore processes.
- Test disaster recovery failover if clustered or multi-region.
- Training & documentation
- Provide admin and user training: new features, UI changes, and best practices.
- Document the environment, customizations, and runbooks for common tasks and incident handling.
- Monitoring & tuning
- Put monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana, New Relic, or equivalent) in place for application metrics, JVM, DB, and search.
- Tune caches, JVM GC, database connection pools, and query performance based on real usage.
Rollback & contingency planning
- Maintain a rollback plan to switch back to the original system if critical issues appear.
- Keep source system available in read-only mode until full acceptance.
- Ensure disaster recovery steps are documented and tested.
Common migration pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Underestimating customizations: inventory and test all custom code early.
- Ignoring permissions complexity: validate ACLs and group mappings during pilot.
- Not preserving UUIDs: breaks references from external systems; ensure UUIDs are kept or remapped.
- Poor search validation: verify index rebuild and search relevance.
- Skipping backups: always take tested backups before migration steps.
Checklist (compact)
- Project goals, stakeholders, success criteria — done
- Inventory of content, customizations, integrations — done
- Target architecture & licenses procured — done
- Staging environment with Alfresco Enterprise installed — done
- Custom modules updated & tested — done
- User/auth mapping & permissions validated — done
- Data cleansing & archival completed — done
- Migration tooling/scripts developed & tested — done
- Pilot migration executed and validated — done
- Backup taken; source in read-only — done
- Full migration performed; search indexed — done
- Integrations reconnected & validated — done
- UAT passed; performance confirmed — done
- Production cutover & monitoring enabled — done
- Documentation, training, backup & DR verified — done
If you want, I can convert this into a printable checklist PDF, create migration scripts examples (CMIS or Alfresco Bulk Import), or draft a runbook for cutover day. Which would you like next?
Leave a Reply