Documerge Migration Practice
As a legacy platform introduced by Image Sciences back in the 1980’s, DocuMerge is a simple yet proven document publishing platform typically run on the Mainframe that has served the Insurance Industry quite well. If you’re still running Documerge today, you probably know that ‘Merge is facing end-of-life in the near future, so the time has come to start planning a migration strategy to newer and more modern publishing solutions like Quadient Inspire, Oracle Documaker, or OpenText Exstream.
Documerge Support
Oracle has placed Documerge on indefinite “sustaining support”, as they typically do with all Oracle Insurance legacy products, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll get all the support that you need to promptly resolve production issues when they arise. What it does mean is that Oracle will provide access to on-line support tools, upgrade rights, pre-existing fixes, and technical support for as long as you own the product and continue to pay annual maintenance fees. The reality is that you'll have very few options available to you if have problems. Bottom-line, if you’re highly-dependent upon your Documerge system, now is the time to establish an execution strategy to a newer & more capable document automation platform.
Important Documerge Migration Tasks
Data & Assembly Logic
EDL conversion from VLAM backup, VDR analysis and extraction of COBOL business logic to base publishing rules or distiller code (depending upon target), creation of field definitions from the Doumerge Rulebase report.
Forms Extraction/Migration
EDL member extraction, migration of printer-resident resources (Metacode overlays, IMG files, SEG/PSEG and fonts), forms re-implementation (approach based upon target platform).
Upstream Integration
Newer systems usually accommodate more stream-lined or loosely-coupled integration mechanisms. Identify current integration processes and determine which can or should be improved.
Target Platform
Identify all data, content, and integration options/capabilities for the target platform, establish best-practices approach to legacy resource migration, utilize target-specific accelerators to facilitate migration.
Operational requirements
Identify post-print operational requirements: print-operations, finishing equipment specifications, print-outsourcing requirements, including any print-stream conditions mandated by finishing equipment.
Downstream Integration
Identify any downstream integration requirements: e-Signature integration, DMS integration, imaging system integration. Also be sure to identify any electronic distribution requirements (email, SMS, etc).
How DocVentive can help
Whether you’re looking to convert your Documerge systems over to Quadient, Documaker, Exstream or some other CCM solution, nobody else has as much experience migrating legacy publishing solutions to modern-day platforms than we do. Our approach to migration largely depends upon the target platform, and we typically avoid conversion of forms due to their static nature (even with Documaker, everything comes over as individual words). It’s much better to re-implement the forms to leverage the features of the new platform. As former Docucorp Executives & Engineers, we have extensive knowledge of Documerge and have established best-practices for migrations to newer solutions. We can even assist in turnkey VDR (Variable Data Reformatter) migration, starting with extensive VDR analysis to extract business logic and determine what needs to be re-written or can be handled by an updated publishing platform. So, whether you’re converting auto insurance quotes or a large commercial policy-issuance line, we can handle it all.