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ALM Data Archiving After Migration: How to Preserve Engineering History When Decommissioning Legacy Systems

Replacing an ALM system shouldn’t mean losing years of engineering history. Learn why legacy data retention matters, why common workarounds fail, and how purpose-built ALM data archiving helps organizations preserve traceability, compliance, and institutional knowledge after migration.

Case Study

Vistrue accelerates seamless Azure DevOps restructuring with OM4ADO

Use Case:

As part of a strategic restructuring, Vistrue underwent a pivotal transformation—splitting into two independent entities, Transcendent and Vistrue. This significant organizational change required a thorough and meticulous bifurcation of its digital work items, ensuring that both companies started with clean, well-organized Azure DevOps environments.

To facilitate this complex migration, OpsHub’s partner CDW referred OM4ADO to Vistrue —reflecting the strong collaboration between OpsHub and CDW in delivering seamless enterprise solutions. Vistrue needed to ensure that all meta entities (such as project templates, custom fields, and workflow states) and work items (user stories, tasks, bugs, etc.) were accurately separated between the two newly created Azure DevOps organizations. Any overlap between the organizations had to be intentional and limited, while dependencies and histories needed to be preserved to maintain continuity in project management and execution.

Additionally, Vistrue required that this migration process be completed with no downtime to avoid disruptions in business operations. The transfer of entities was to be performed based on predefined criteria, particularly by sorting work items according to their area paths—a critical aspect in ensuring that both organizations would receive only the relevant data.

Challenges

The primary challenge was executing the migration swiftly and efficiently while maintaining data integrity and minimizing risks. The Vistrue team needed to bifurcate their entire work item infrastructure across two distinct Azure DevOps cloud organizations without losing any vital information.

The team faced challenges like:

Data Integrity: Ensuring that all work items, including linked metadata like comments, history, and dependencies, migrated without discrepancies or overlap.
No Downtime: The migration process had to occur without affecting ongoing operations, making it essential that no downtime was introduced during the transfer.
Scalability: Handling a large volume of work items with extensive revision histories, linkages, and dependencies across two separate environments.
Customization: The migration needed to adhere to specific criteria based on area paths to ensure work items were accurately divided between Transcendent and Vistrue.

Solution:

OM4ADO (OpsHub Migration for Azure DevOps) provided the ideal solution to facilitate Vistrue’s seamless transition. With its enterprise-scale capabilities, OM4ADO enabled the migration team to transfer work items, meta entities, and associated linkages across the two organizations with no disruptions.

To optimize the migration process, Vistrue deployed four service users in both the source and target Azure DevOps environments. This configuration allowed for parallel processing, effectively distributing the workload and significantly reducing migration time. Each service user was responsible for a specific batch of work items, ensuring that data was efficiently segmented and transferred without any loss or duplication.

Key features of OM4ADO that made the migration successful:

Data Fidelity: OM4ADO preserved all revisions, comments, attachments, and dependencies, ensuring a complete and intact migration for each work item.

Zero Downtime: The tool’s parallel processing capability enabled Vistrue to maintain business continuity, with no disruptions experienced during the transition.

Area Path-Based Segmentation: By leveraging OM4ADO’s ability to filter work items based on area paths, the team ensured that each entity received only the data relevant to its organizational structure, with minimal manual intervention.

Results:

Thanks to the effective use of OM4ADO, Vistrue achieved a seamless migration with:

100% Data Integrity: Every work item, its history, and its dependencies were successfully transferred without discrepancies.
Zero Business Disruption: The migration occurred in the background, allowing teams to continue their work uninterrupted.
Efficient Transfer: The use of multiple service users drastically reduced the time required for the migration, allowing Vistrue to meet its tight restructuring deadlines.

Transcendent and Vistrue were both fully operational on their new Azure DevOps platforms, with tailored workspaces that aligned with their distinct organizational needs.

Conclusion:

The partnership between Vistrue and OpsHub, leveraging OM4ADO, ensured a smooth, risk-free transition during the company’s restructuring. This case stands as a testament to the power of an advanced, scalable migration tool in handling complex organizational shifts with precision and reliability.

OpsHub Helps Software Teams Accelerate Innovation by Enabling Them to:

Capture

Maximize the potential of data throughout the value chain using new and innovative tools. OpsHub empowers the seamless adoption of new tools, ensuring a smooth transition without disruptions or downtime.

Eliminate data silos within the organization, promoting effortless information sharing among teams. With OpsHub’s bidirectional integration capability, teams gain automatic access to comprehensive and up-to-date information within their native system, in real-time.

Legacy Lock-In

Unleash the potential of the captured data to derive valuable insights that drive actionable decisions, enabling organizations to make informed choices. OpsHub facilitates the utilization of captured data to its full extent, empowering organizations to harness the power of knowledge.