FileNet Content Services Concepts - Part 5

Replication Services Overview

Replication Services gives your documents greater availability across your enterprise, automatically and without compromising document integrity. Instead of manually creating and maintaining the necessary user accounts and documents on separate libraries, replication automatically copies the documents and related security to another library system.

Replication Services provides a way to make documents and items in one library system available to other library systems. Replication Services automatically copies documents, items, and their security to additional specified library systems. As documents are checked out, updated, and checked in again, the changes are synchronized across the other libraries.

When a document is replicated, both the file content and the property values for standard properties and existing custom properties of the document are copied into the library systems participating in Replication Services. Users can quickly locate and access a replicated document anywhere in any replicated library. All instances of replicated documents or folders in any library system are periodically synchronized with any alterations to the original document or folder.

However, the synchronization is not immediate. That is, Replication is an asynchronous store-and-forward system. Changes are logged into a queue for processing, and then propagated to the replica libraries. The processing may take place almost immediately, or it may take place only during certain hours of the day, depending on your configuration parameters, the number and type of changes requested, the network load, and the availability of the replica libraries. For example, if a replica library is offline for maintenance (or a power failure), the update cannot be completed until the library is available again.

A replicated document's current status is reflected on all the participating library systems: if checked out, a document will be marked as checked out on all of these library systems. When a new version is checked in, that new version is replicated to all the participating library systems. Replication Services runs independently of the other library system services. Thus, Replication Services can continue running while other library system services are stopped and restarted and can automatically resynchronize with these library system services when they restart. Using Replication Services can have a profound impact on your library system configurations and the hardware and software resources required. Take time to carefully plan your system before you implement replication in your network.

Additional point: You must copy Document Classes and Controlled Vocabulary Lists (CVLs) from one library to another using the import and export tools available in CS Explorer.