Moving into Documaster

In this article you learn how to clean up your existing document portfolio and prepare them for moving into Documaster by the specification below.

What is a migration?

A migration is the work of taking your existing document portfolio, cleaning it up and moving it into Documaster. This is what we at Documaster call a migration project, which is a joint project between you and Documaster.

How do I get my documents into Documaster?

There are two ways of moving your documents into Documaster:

• You can drag and drop your documents from your file manager, like Explorer for Windows or Finder for Mac, into your browser to upload them to Documaster. This is well suited for smaller amounts of Documents, for example up to some thousand documents at a time, depending on their size and type.

• You can buy a migration project from Documaster to get assistance to import large amounts of documents into Documaster. This is well suited for large quantities of documents, like when you have tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents. Documaster provide a specification below on how to run such a migration.

What kind of data sources are there?

At Documaster we differ between two different types of data sources, which means where you store your documents today.

You store your documents as files in a filesystem that contains files and folders.

You store your documents as files or data in a proprietary legacy system, for example Lotus Notes, an ERP or CRM system.

What are the steps of getting my documents into Documaster?

From a high-level view, these are the steps you need to go through to get your documents out of their existing location and into Documaster.

• For a drag and drop migration:

  • Cleanup in your existing location.

  • You drag and drop your documents into Documaster

• For a migration project:

  • Cleanup in your existing location.

  • If stored in a proprietary legacy system, you export according to Documaster specification.

  • You pack your documents according to Documaster specification.

  • You upload your packed documents to Documaster through our secure SFTP server.

  • We unpack and import your documents into Documaster.

In the following chapters, we elaborate on each step in the process.

How to cleanup

A filesystem or a proprietary legacy system may contain large amounts of files or data that is not going to be migrated to Documaster. The better the cleanup is, the better the result will get in Documaster.

How to export from proprietary legacy system

You need to export your files or data into documents on a filesystem, accompanied by a JSON file that describes the documents. The JSON file must be produced according to the following specification.

[SPECIFICATION HERE]

How to pack your documents

Once all your documents is cleaned and ready, they must be packed, also known as being zipped. This is what you need to think of when zipping your documents.

We reccomend using the open source archiving system called tar, with the following parameters, according to the tar documentation:

-c to create an archive

-z to compress the archive through gzip

-f to create one or more files of the archive

Furthermore, we recommend splitting the archive into multiple parts, which makes it easy to continue uploading in case of an aborted transfer. This can be done by using the | split -d -b 100M - tardisk switch, which in this case splits the archive into 100 megabyte files.

A complete command may look like this:

tar -czf archive.tar.gz | split -d -b 100M - tardisk

How to upload your documents

Documaster will provide you with creditentials to our SFTP server onto where you simply upload your complete archive using a SFTP client of your choice. It can be automated using the built-in ftp command in Linux systems or select a client based on your desires.