NOTE: Before starting the Discovery process, it’s strongly recommended that all relevant documents are ‘checked-in’ otherwise such items may not be captured by the discovery process.

Go to on the Navigation panel to access Migration Job Management and then select the appropriate job.

 

 

After selecting a job the Migration Dashboard is displayed, Select Discovery.

 

 

Select Start Discovery option to begin the process of capturing information about the source environment into PMA.  For many sources, the discovery progress will be displayed in the above screen.  For IManage and EDocs, discovery statistics will only be shown at the end of discovery.

After Discovery is complete, the discovery statistics information on the Migration Dashboard will be updated to reflect the information captured during the discovery.

 

 

          6.1.1.  Background Operations

Discovery, pre-check, and migration activities can run as background operations allow allowing the client still to be used during that time.  Select the button on the Discovery Progress/Migration whilst operation is running.   The relevant statistics will be continually updated on the dashboard and the status will be displayed as “In Progress”.  Select the icon to return the full progress screen.

 

 

Only one background operation can execute on the PMA server at any one time.  When a background process is running, it will disable options on the dashboard for the current job and all other jobs.

• Discovery – For current and all other jobs, all options available with the exception of Discovery, Pre-check, Migration and Shortcut Links 
• Migration – All options disabled within the current job.  For all other jobs, Discovery, Pre-check Migration and Shortcut Links are disabled.

The options become enabled as soon as the background operation completes.

 

          6.1.2.  Discover Errors

Any failures during discovery will count as discovery errors.  Errors can often be at the folder level so even a single discovery error could mean that there are still many 1000’s of items that need to be discovered so it’s essential these errors are understood and resolved if possible.

 

          6.1.3.  Filter Discovery Options 

Use the Change Settings option to control the discovery of security information or apply a filter to what should be discovered.  By default, this option is only available when Discovery has not previously been executed.  See advanced discovery option in general settings for more information.

Discover Security Information

In most cases, this option should be selected but in migrations where all the security information is determined by the target location then this option can be unselected which will improve discovery performance. 

 

          6.1.4.  Version Filtering 

For some projects it can be useful to limit the number of versions of documents that are migrated.  This can be done at the discovery stage by filtering the number of items discovered.  Using this feature it’s possible to limit the discovery to just the latest version of each document or the last ‘N’ versions, where N is a value specified by the user.

This feature is available for ShareFile source.

Delta behaviour when limiting versions

If a version filter is applied and discovery occurs and the subsequent source item is edited then when discovery is run again, these new version(s) will be discovered, and this will not affect the already discovered items.  So for example if version filter is last 3 versions and then a source document is edited twice and discovery re-run then 5 versions of the document will now be in PMA staging database to be migrated.

 

           6.1.5.  Discovery Filters

Discovery filters can be applied to limit the information captured during discovery.  The filtering capabilities available vary depending upon the source system and whether PMA is configured to use the source system API or not.  For example, connecting to Documentum using API provides different filter capabilities if connecting using DB.  So, it’s important to understand filtering requirements before fully configuring source connection.

Editing Discovery Filters

By default, after a discovery has begun it’s not possible to edit the discovery filter.  This is because it can create inconsistent results.  For example having no filter and then adding a filter does not remove existing discovered items. Equally removing an entry in the filter does not remove the items from discovery.

However in some scenarios it can be useful to edit the filter, for example to correct a filter value that is specified incorrectly. 

Based upon the scenarios above, if editing the filter will not create inconsistent results, then by selecting the Advanced discovery option in General Settings, it allows the Discovery filter to be edited even after discovery has started.  Content Technical Support for further information.

 

          6.1.6.  Reset Discovery

The Reset Discovery option is available after Discovery has been run and may be useful if the Discovery was incorrect and needs to be restarted anew or the size of the staging database needs to be reduced after a migration job has completed the migration.  It will remove all existing discovered items, as well as structure, content, and security mappings.  It does NOT delete data migrated into the target.

After the reset has completed, the Start Discovery option is displayed to allow a new discovery process to be started.