How Interchange works

Plan a more thoughtful migration

Migrations mean risk and cost. Vendor tools are oriented towards keeping users on a platform, not helping them off of it. Available tools often don’t fit the use case, don’t support the new target platform or old source platform, or are too expensive. Even minor delays in schedule or slight data issues can have massive business impacts. All-or-nothing migrations over a tight cutover window can cause risk to skyrocket. Custom approaches can have lengthy build and test cycles, and cost can quickly spiral.

Interchange gives you more than a toolset: it gives you time. With Interchange, you have a fast setup, a built-in set of tools and connectors, and the ability to migrate data one document, one department, or one company at a time. With Interchange, you avoid high-risk cutovers, and full custom builds. Combined with Intellective Unity, you can make the entire process transparent for your users.

Import and export without heavy lifting

Interchange provides out of the box connectors that crawl and import data from your source systems, and export it to your target systems, without building complex custom connectors or ad-hoc migration paths. We connect via the native APIs and methodologies of the systems you use. Do you Have a custom-built or legacy system? Use our connector framework to build and deploy a new connector quickly. Interchange works natively with documents, images, metadata, database content, workflow objects, cases, and more

Reduce impact on your enterprise systems

With Interchange, an enterprise index of your information is created to allow quick search to find the content the user is looking for needed. This shifts the load of building queries to the index and removes it from the repository allowing it to handle content addition, edits, and updates. The Enterprise Index has the flexibility to either be updated near real-time or in a more traditional asynchronous batch mode. For most systems, near real- time can be supported with action triggers and requires an update to the index (i.e. add, delete, update). This often results in an overtaxed legacy system. To protect the legacy system, updates must be timed to occur at off- peak hours or in a predefined window.

Migrate high volume, at high speed, with low risk

Interchange scales from low-volume, off- hours migration up to extremely high-volume, high-speed scenarios. The Interchange platform is architected for multi-node stream-based processing using industry- standard technologies like Kafka to provide true high-volume scalability.

Don’t just move data: transform it

Interchange provides a rich toolset to merge and transform data in-flight during migration. You can translate data to the new system’s desired format, correct legacy data issues, merge and enrich existing data from multiple sources, and more. Interchange’s modular framework gives you total flexibility to run rules or execute logic while data is moving to the target destination.

Handle complex case and workflow migration

Case management systems and active workflows present unique challenges when migrating. Preserving in-flight work and data while moving to a new platform can lead to either huge customization efforts, or disruption to the business to cut over safely. Rather than rebuilding active processes from scratch, use Interchange’s toolset to smoothly transition case and process data into a new system, without interrupting in-flight processes or requiring complex one-use custom work.

Retire your legacy systems – now or in the future

Many ECM and BPM systems have reached their end of life, or have been absorbed by competitors. Alfresco, Documentum, Perceptive, and many others have been cquired, while IBM, OpenText, and other large vendors have modernized or transitioned their core ECM/BPM systems and technologies. Users are often left with data stuck in legacy systems, increased cost of extended support, and required migrations and updates. Interchange provides a framework to move from old, legacy, or sunsetting environments onto modern systems. You can migrate content from older repositories, such as Documentum, IBM Image Services, or IBM ImagePlus, directly to newer repositories, like IBM BAW or Box. Interchange can also migrate older workflow applications, such as those built on IBM FileNet Business Process Framework, or DocumentumxCP, directly to a new system. We give you tools to address your current needs, but also a platform to quickly adapt to future changes. As the speed of consolidation and evolution increases, Interchange future-proofs you with the tools to confidently handle any new landscape.

Meet increasing demands of artificial intelligence and machine learning

Data is increasingly the fuel that feeds next- generation systems based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Your legacy data is a potential goldmine of insights, process improvements, customer knowledge, and competitive advantage. Interchange helps unlock that potential by making legacy data accessible. You can migrate data from legacy systems into AI/ML-connected system, both as a permanent conversion or as a separate data stream. Interchange can transform data and merge it with relevant data sources, turning patchy and unusable data into rich, detailed, usable inputs in your AI/ML processes

Meet governance requirements while keeping the business moving

We live in a rapidly changing ecosystem of content collaboration, low code/no-code application platforms, and rapid-development process platforms. The best system for long-term governance and retention of the content may not be the system that the business prefers, or that customers demand. Interchange allows you to get the best of both worlds: use collaborative systems for business use cases, then transition data to long-term governance repositories according to triggers like creation date, document lifecycle status, and more. Interchange can be a permanent framework for moving data, documents, and processes to new systems according to your business rules. And combined with Intellective Unity, users never need to know which system your data ultimately lives in.

Stay in full control of your migration

One of the greatest challenges of migration is understanding what happened, when, and why. Minor data inconsistencies can blossom into data corruption, and issues occur at high speed under tight resolution timeframes Interchange gives you the tools to understand and control what’s happening with your migration, with a detailed record of all actions taken, in real-time, with full transparency. While many organizations are forced to take a high-risk “hope for the best” approach to migration, Interchange gives you a toolset to plan and execute a controlled, successful migration, along with the detailed output to prove what was done.