Migrating Out of IBM Content Manager OnDemand: What You Need to Know

For almost thirty years, IBM Content Manager OnDemand has served as a foundation for high volume document archiving across major industries, especially insurance, financial services, and utilities. Many insurers still call it simply “OnDemand,” a reflection of its long history and importance as one of the earliest large-scale archival systems.

As organizations transition to cloud-based platforms and face greater regulatory and operational expectations, many are now evaluating legacy systems that no longer support modern business requirements. IBM Content Manager OnDemand is widely considered a legacy platform. It was first released in the early 1990s with major releases in the decades that followed, but adoption slowed as cloud technologies such as Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online began to dominate the content services landscape.

Today, the need for modernization is accelerating. Organizations are actively planning their migration to SharePoint Online, improving accessibility, reducing infrastructure costs, and enabling AI and compliance capabilities that traditional archival platforms cannot provide. With the right tooling, even extremely large migrations can be completed quickly. A recent Peregrine migration successfully moved fourteen million documents (14,000,000) in less than two days, demonstrating that even the largest IBM Content Manager OnDemand environments can be modernized with confidence.

Whether the goal is cloud adoption, improved access, cost efficiency, or better governance, migrating away from IBM Content Manager OnDemand is a strategic move that delivers long-term value. The following considerations will help guide a successful migration.

Top Three Tips for Migrating from IBM Content Manager OnDemand

1. Carefully Evaluate the Stability of Your Existing IBM Content Manager OnDemand System

Environments running IBM Content Manager OnDemand vary widely in age and complexity. Many repositories have been running for fifteen or even twenty years, carrying custom scripts, legacy indexing routines, and older storage structures that may behave unpredictably during extraction.

Before beginning your migration, complete a stability assessment that includes:

• Reviewing system logs and historical error patterns

• Identifying index routines that may fail during large batch extraction

• Verifying storage tiers and archived volumes are accessible

• Confirming IBM Content Manager OnDemand can handle sustained high volume data streaming

Addressing stability concerns early reduces the risk of extraction failures and ensures consistent migration performance.

2. Conduct Performance Checks on Extraction and Ingestion

A successful migration to SharePoint Online depends on understanding the performance characteristics of both the source system and the destination environment.

Extraction Performance

IBM Content Manager OnDemand must handle significantly higher load during a migration than during regular operation. Older environments may rely on aging hardware, older operating systems, or slower storage architectures that can bottleneck throughput.

Evaluate:

• How many parallel extraction threads IBM Content Manager OnDemand can safely support

• How legacy index structures behave under load

• Whether storage performance degrades during mass extraction

Ingestion Performance

On the destination side, SharePoint Online has its own performance considerations. Microsoft enforces service protection rules, which means that aggressive ingestion can cause SharePoint Online to slow or temporarily limit migration throughput (throttling).

Before starting your migration to SharePoint Online, understand:

• How SharePoint Online handles high volume ingestion

• What batching and throttling strategies are required

• How metadata, folder hierarchy, and permissions will be mapped

• Using SharePoint migration API will improve the migration speed

By balancing extraction speed with SharePoint Online ingestion capacity, organizations achieve a smooth and predictable migration.

3. Determine Whether Data Transformation Is Required

Migrating out of IBM Content Manager OnDemand is the perfect opportunity to modernize document formats and improve long-term accessibility. Many archives contain legacy print stream formats, proprietary file types, or documents that are not searchable and are not suitable for AI enabled workloads.

During migration planning, evaluate whether you need to:

• Convert documents to PDF for long-term accessibility

• Apply Optical Character Recognition to make content searchable (SharePoint has full text search, why not use it)

• Standardize metadata and retention rules to align with modern governance programs

Organizations commonly use the migration to SharePoint Online as the moment to clean, classify, and normalize older content so it becomes more usable and more valuable.

Where Organizations Move After IBM Content Manager OnDemand

The most common and strategic destination after leaving IBM Content Manager OnDemand is SharePoint Online.

Organizations choose a migration to SharePoint Online because it provides:

• Modern and familiar document access for all users

• Integration with Microsoft 365 services including Teams, Purview, and Power Platform

• Cloud-based scale that eliminates legacy infrastructure

• Built-in compliance and records management capabilities

• Readiness for future AI (Copilot) and automation workloads

SharePoint Online has become the dominant modern replacement for IBM Content Manager OnDemand due to its flexibility, cost efficiency, and deep integration into enterprise collaboration.

A Modern Approach to IBM Content Manager OnDemand Migration

Legacy extraction methods for IBM Content Manager OnDemand often rely on custom scripts or outdated tools that do not support modern cloud platforms. Migration today requires accuracy, auditability, massive throughput, and full compatibility with SharePoint Online.

This is where Peregrine Migrate excels. Peregrine is designed specifically for large-scale content migrations and offers:

• High volume extraction optimized for IBM Content Manager OnDemand

• Intelligent ingestion pipelines designed for SharePoint Online

• Optional PDF conversion, Optical Character Recognition, and metadata enrichment

• Proven results including migrating fourteen million documents in less than two days

• Complete audit, reconciliation, and reporting for compliance and verification

Peregrine provides organizations with a reliable, high speed, and fully validated pathway from IBM Content Manager OnDemand to SharePoint Online. 

P.S. Don’t forget about SharePoint Embedded

SharePoint Embedded is also emerging as a powerful destination for long-term document storage and application-based content solutions, and it is becoming an additional option for organizations planning the next evolution of their archive.