CCM Legacy Modernization

Award-winning insurance company in New York provides first-class insurance for home, auto, and business via local, trusted and independent agents decided to optimize their customer communication by migrating their policy documents from Calligo (a product of Oracle) to the OpenText Exstream platform. This customer also got the older versions of Exstream (7.0 and 8.6) where around 35 applications were built.

The main objective of this project is to study the current architecture of Calligo, the layout of the customer driver file, document generation, and loading mechanism and setup Exstream Design and Production platform to replace Calligo. This project is also to upgrade the applications built on the older version to the newer version of Exstream.

 

Business Case

One of the major drivers for this project was risk reduction; the carrier was grappling with Calligo, an outdated, end-of-life solution no longer supported by Oracle and unable to operate on modern technology platforms.

The client needed an expert team who can study and understand the existing architecture of legacy documents and convert them into Exstream.

Solution for Migration

Eurus team has analysed the legacy forms, business conditions, layout of an input, requirements for output generation, source and destination platform, archival process and real-time setup. Following are the key solutions implemented by Eurus Team.

  •  XML is an input file; it decides the sequence of the forms.
  •  Variable mapping was done based on the attribute value of each tag.
  •  Data sections are used.
  •  Data sections are also controlling the iterations of forms for different values.
  •  Frames are used to flow the dynamic values along with static contents.
  •  Images are handled in external (initialization) file.
  •  Reusable components were built to optimize the solution.
  •  Linux setup has configured to run Exstream Engine.
  •  MQ Connectors are used to process the requests in real-time.
  •  Java based custom tool is built to compare the PDFs from source and destination systems.

Results

Policy documents are successfully converted to Exstream platform. Over the long run, this migration will save the effort and maintenance cost to the customer. This centralized platform will help the customer to add additional policy documents in future.

Solution for Upgrade

There are Exstream applications built in the older version 7.0 and 8.6. OpenText has announced that Exstream version 7.0 is outdated and the support will not be available. Eurus team has studied Exstream applications and the complexity before upgrade process.

  •  Backups were taken for Production Databases.
  •  Database Maintenance process was executed before Upgrade.
  •  DBAdmin utility is used to copy objects from lower to higher version.
  •  List contents of each application from older and newer version has been verified and compared.
  •  Contents of Package file has been compared from older vs newer.
  •  Replaced existing version of Design Environment (ie Design Manager and Designer).
  •  Tested every application.
  •  New production engine has been installed and activated.
  •  Shell scripts were built to run the Engine in batch and real-time mode.
  •  PDF comparator is a Java based tool, built for the project, has been used to compare the outputs from lower vs newer packages.

Results

Exstream applications that were running on lower versions have upgraded to version 9.5, this will help the customer to contact OpenText team for any technical support. Having applications on newer version will also help the customer to use additional features of latest version.