O2 Slovakia was awarded in 2012 during an independent customer survey for a fourth time the Operator of the year in Slovakia. At 31st of December 2011 the number of active customers reached more than 1 164 000. The net increase of active customers from beginning of 2011 featured 283 735. Based on independent agency evaluation the company in a long term reaches the highest value of customer satisfaction from all the Slovakian market operators. O2 Slovakia is a member of the PPF Group. More information about the company you can find: www.o2.sk.
Situation
O2 Slovakia operated its electronic archive of client documentation for a long time on SW platform IBM FileNet. In recent years, however, due to general pressure on savings, total cost of the platform ownership proved to be too high and so the demand was to investigate possibilities of the entire solution migration to a different platform. Logical step was to primarily assess capabilities of competitive platform Open Text, the recent world leader of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology market, represented on Czech and Slovakian market by partner company IXTENT, resp. IXTENT Slovakia. IXTENT is in fact a long term supplier of the Open Text solution to O2 Czech Republic, parent company of O2 Slovakia, and in addition since 2008 also an implementation partner and support provider for the electronic archive as well as related digitalization technology Kofax to the O2 Slovakia itself. Due to knowledge of environment, all the affected technologies, their integrations and program modifications, IXTENT was able to assess the best ways of realizing migration project, including estimation of related costs. By optimization of necessary licenses, so the license type precisely matches needs of the customer, by minimization of project activities, so the already existing integration services are used in maximum possible extent, by project duration shortening, so the customer side workload is lowest possible, and last but not the least by ability to use standard HW servers instead of expensive Itanium devices, IXTENT managed to provide proposal in such form which was evaluated to be generally advantageous for the customer. The whole project was approved and started during October 2011.
Solution
Migration of the electronic client document archive solution was planned to be delivered in form of exchanging “box for box”, thus making maximum use of existing components and integrations and completely preserving the original functionality. Project duration was scheduled for 4 months and during the new solution implementation around 24 million archived documents had to be migrated with emphasis on safety and reliability. Loss of even a single document was in fact an unaccepted risk. Developed migration script for export of documents and their metadata from the original archive as well as modified standard Document Pipeline tool for import to the implemented new solution had to therefore include sufficient control mechanisms to prevent such situation.
Document export from IBM FileNet consisted of the following steps:
| Step | Detail Description |
| Export of document IDs list | Creation of documents list from FileNet media. |
| Batches preparation | Creation of optimal size batches for other export tools taking in consideration number of instances and FileNet workload. |
| Content export in FOB format | Download of documents content in FOB (FileNet OBject) format and storing to disk array. |
| Generating of XML and native formats | Download of documents metadata, writing to XML files. FOB files conversion to native formats, merging more pages document TIFF files to one multipage TIFF. |
| Monitoring | Monitoring of batch processing speed and number of processed documents. Errors central monitoring. |
Document import to Open Text consisted of the following steps:
| Step | Detail Description |
| Copying of input files | Copying of documents and index XML files to Linux application server Open Text. |
| Prepipeline script | Input data conversion to format required by Document Pipeline. |
| Pipeline skript | Load of documents into Open Text through Document Pipeline, delete of input data from application server. |
| Monitoring | Monitoring of batch processing speed and number of processed documents. Errors central monitoring. |
| Migration quality control | Control of migration success rate and quality. |
Another task was to partially overwrite existing services that provide integration to systems deployed in the customer’s infrastructure, mainly:
- Billing system – from which individual client bills are archived
- Scanning and OCR/ICR technology Kofax – from which documents scanned on all branches are archived
- CRM system Siebel – which is used as primary access application to the electronic archive for call center operators
Above that it was necessary to provide the customer according to his requirements with customization of Open Text standard web application for management of archived documents and their metadata.
Because of security reasons the whole solution was deployed in High-Availability mode using cluster and load balancing. WORM (Write Once Read More) appliance EMC Centera was used as a physical HW storage.
The whole project was completed in 4,5 months instead of initially planned 4 months, mainly due to longer optimization of export and import tools to ensure acceptable length of individual migration runs. The last incremental migration run then took place just before deploying into production after waiting for window for release of production systems on April 11, 2012.
Summary
Deployment of the new software platform Open Text, the world leader of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology market, resulted mainly in significant financial savings from system operation, when Return On Investment comes out shorter than 1 year. Other indirect positive effects from the implementation are higher user work comfort and improvement of overall system performance.
