Question

AppXtender to Laserfiche Migration

Laserfiche Migration

Updated December 8, 2023

asked on November 12, 2020

Hello,

I'm currently working with a prospect who needs to migrate almost 700GB of data to Laserfiche from their AppXtender 7.0 system.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of migration?

I noticed that there is an application called 'Migration Utility' under the AppX program files. I tried going through the wizard but I got stuck at the second step where it asks for a destination database. This makes me think that this migration utility is for migrating within AppX only, and not for exporting outside of AppX. Is this correct?

Additionally, I opened there 'Document Manager' application, which is like LF's desktop client, and was able to manually export document images as TIF files. However, I was not able to figure out how to export the associated metadata fields for each document. Does anyone know how to do this?

Ultimately, what we would like to produce are TIF files for the document images, and LST files for the associated metadata. Does anyone have any experience with this?

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Answer

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replied on November 13, 2020

The Migration Utility is used by AppXtender to move documents from one AppXtender "application" (repository) to another. This utility is not helpful for your migration purposes.

Similar to Laserfiche, there is no "simple" way to export bulk AppXtender documents without loosing metadata.

In the sql database, there are two primary tables for each application, the DTx and DLx tables. X is the AppID of the application. The DT table has the metadata with a linking docid. The DL table has the page information with a linking docid.

In the DL table, there is an objectid for each page. This object id is divisible by 1024. When you divide the objectid by 1024 until it can no longer divide by a whole number, that is the folder structure of where to find the *.bin file. Use the pathid to determine the initial storage location and the objectid to determine the remainder of the storage path.

All documents in AppXtender are *.bin files. They are just renamed to .bin. If all documents are scanned, .bin file can just be renamed to .tif.

Hope this helps and gets you started.

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View 5 previous replies

replied on November 13, 2020

Thank you Nevin, this is definitely helpful. We'll take a look at those tables and see if we can make sense of it.

How would you recommend getting that stuff into LF? With a workflow?

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replied on November 13, 2020

You could use Workflow. Pull the data from sql and building the metadata and filepath to the images.

You had mentioned about creating a LST file to import into LF. You should be able to take the sql data to create the LST file.

It probably depends on the volume of data in AppXtender as to how you would want to proceed.

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replied on November 18, 2020

Hi Nevin,

do you know of a better way to get the images and metadata into LF? Or is the TIF/LST file combo the best way to do it?

I've used the TIF/LST method before and it's fairly easy to execute the import once you have all the files ready.

Just wondering if you knew of a better way to do it.

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replied on November 19, 2020

Personally, I have not used anything outside of creating an import file from the AX database.

It would make sense that workflow might give you more flexibility and error control, but I have not tried that before.

I used to be in the AppXtender world for years and am very comfortable navigating the product. I can't say I have done a lot of conversions, I just understand the AX side.

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replied on November 19, 2020

I did a quick Google search on creating an import file using AppX but didn't find anything helpful.

Do you have any notes or links you can share on how to do that? Is this done within SQL?

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replied on March 17, 2021

Hi Nevin. Thanks for you post. It was very helpful in relating the bin files, dl, and dt tables with each other. Do you know where annotation information is stored? I'm trying to export out of AX for a migration but many of the files have redaction annotations and I'm not finding how the annotations coordinates are stored. TYIA for any help.

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replied on March 18, 2021

I did not have to deal with annotations very often. I know there are db tables that contain annotation information.

I would suggest creating a new application, bring in a single document, annotation, then look in the db tables to see where data is stored.

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replied on December 8, 2023

If anyone comes across this issue in the future, CDI has a history of migrating data from AppXtender to Laserfiche (currently doing several of those conversions, the largest at the scale of hundreds of millions of records). The difficulty is not just the extraction, but handling the compressed files, annotations (if they exist), and handling the way some implementations splits documents resulting in a many to many relationship between the documents.

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Replies

replied on November 20, 2020

Nevin,

after looking through Document Manager and SQL, we were not able to figure out how to export the information we need.

I've heard that there are a couple of LF VARs out there that provide migration services for AppX to LF.

Do you provide migration services to other VARs?

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replied on November 20, 2020 • Show version history

I personally do not provide that service. The VAR I work for may.

I know there are several VARs out there that have experience with both products, I just don't know their names.

I could spend about 30 minutes with you to show you how the database links. That should get you the information you need.

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replied on November 23, 2020

Thanks for all your help Nevin.

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replied on August 3, 2022

I am a contractor and have written a migration tool. I can do the migration for you if you need.

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replied on December 17, 2020

This reply may come to late - but

I have worked with migrating ApX into Laserfiche. We purchased a program from our ApX vendor -

Information Systems Corporation- www.iscimaging.com (written by them) that allowed us to export the ApX data/metadata and from there, we used Quick Fields Processor to put it back together upon import to Laserfiche. This worked nicely though it was time consuming.

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replied on December 18, 2020

Hi Beth, thanks for the response. We chose to outsource this part of the project to IP Digital, Inc. in Massachusetts. They specialize in migrating data into Laserfiche and will be performing our migration for us.

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