Are you ready to move from Alfresco to…?

By Derick Deleo

I have been in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) business for over two decades. I have talked to customers small and large (and I mean very large) and in many different industries over the years. I have competed against many ECM vendors while at IBM and then Nuxeo. So yes, I have heard a lot and seen a lot. And I plan to offer my views on a lot of topics, like this one, but also about the apparent demise of ECM, the fallacies of sales methodologies, and what really makes a good leader. But today I want to focus on customers considering moving away from Alfresco.

Like I said, I have competed against a lot of different ECM vendors, and Alfresco was one of them. Both at IBM and again at Nuxeo. And when we did compete, more often than not, we won.

Why, you ask? At IBM it was because we had the strength of IBM behind us and a customer base, back then away, that was strong in support of the ECM products and strategy – I said back then, so please do not espouse how wrong that statement is today; I know that already.

At Nuxeo it was even easier. Nuxeo still is the most scalable ECM platform; designed from the ground up for scale. It was the first ECM platform to support and prefer a NoSQL database, MongDB. It was the first ECM platform to support Elasticsearch (now also supporting OpenSearch). It was the first ECM platform designed to run in the cloud as well if not better than on-premise. And it was the first, and to my knowledge is still the only ECM platform to publish a 11 BILLION object benchmark. And it was not a slam-dunk benchmark test. We actually interviewed two of the largest in volume customers at the time and got their input on how the content and data model should be designed, how the architecture should be designed and deployed, and how the test scenarios should be run. So yeah, it was easy to compete at Nuxeo; especially because from all of our experiences with IBM and other ECM vendors, we knew that Alfresco could not scale to that level.

We did not win every opportunity against Alfresco. We did not even compete on every opportunity. In recent times I have heard from some Alfresco customers about issues with performance as their system has grown.

Since Hyland has BOTH Alfresco and Nuxeo in their product suite, while I was at Hyland I needed to play an unbiased role. I left Hyland several months ago, so I can now be unbiased and more focused on what I believe is right for these customers – I will add that I never misled a customer while at Hyland, I was just diplomatic in my advice. And what do I think is right for customers who have reached volumes that Alfresco was never designed to handle? It sounds simple, but I know that no migration, big or small, is ever simple; but the simple truth is that migration IS the only solution.

I have lived through many migrations over the decades that I have been in this business. No two migrations are ever the same, no one tool is ever the answer to all migrations, and migrations are about more than just moving content and data. Some migrations include annotations, which are never easy to migrate. And all migrations require close attention to how the system has been integrated to other systems and how it may have been customized (either at the User Interface (UI) level or at the backend). I would NEVER recommend trying to migrate from one system to another by yourself; the challenges in migrations are many, and if you have never performed a migration before you will be unaware of the challenges you will, not may, encounter.

The only way to attempt a migration from Alfresco to Nuxeo or…(I will leave the “or” just hanging out there for now and talk about that in a later post.) is to find a service provider that has been there and done that enough to know what challenges to expect. Now I will be a little biased, forgive me but I am now working in semi-retirement with some friends and former colleagues from Nuxeo and their talented team, Maretha Solutions. And Maretha has been there and done that. Maretha has collectively migrated BILLIONS of objects for many customers. They have very deep expertise on Nuxeo and they know how to perform migrations at rates that most can only dream of (I am not making that up, I have seen it first-hand).

So what is my point to this post? If you are thinking about moving from Alfresco to Nuxeo or…(Yes, I’m leaving that hang out there again; hey, I want you to keep reading my posts) reach out to us at Maretha ([email protected]). We would welcome a chance to start the conversation and give you some advice and guidance and maybe help you perform a migration.

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