A French government ministry
Modernising document production and customer communications management (CCM)
Faced with fragmented document production and highly specific business requirements, a French government ministry embarked on a complete overhaul of its customer communications management. Since 2023, Coexya has supported the programme in deploying a centralised CCM platform built on OpenText Communications, which today underpins several tens of millions of documents produced each year.
Public-sector document production fragmented by highly specific business needs
Documents sit at the heart of this ministry’s activity: every year it produces and distributes a massive volume of official documents to citizens and institutional partners. Before the overhaul, document production relied on several disparate solutions accumulated through earlier unification attempts that never came to fruition, leaving users dissatisfied with the tools in place and Word still widely used despite already advanced interactivity requirements.
To select its new platform, the ministry ran more than a year of proof-of-concept work to evaluate OpenText Exstream Cloud-Native (OpenText Communications) against other solutions on the market and to test its integration within its application ecosystem: the depth of complex template design, the autonomy given to business contributors, interactivity, interoperability, approval workflows, and deployment monitoring and automation. Performance tests at loads well above usual activity peaks, together with several disaster-recovery scenarios, confirmed the solution’s scalability and resilience before it was formally selected.
Discover our Document Production & CCM offer
A programme structured around two high-volume business chains
A first business chain at very high volume
Coexya supported the migration of a first business chain that alone accounts for 60 million documents produced and a target of 23,000 interactive users. This chain relies on two document production systems that together manage around 1,000 document templates. The first workstream delivered was the semi-automated migration of one of these two systems onto the new platform. The most complex document in this scope contained 13 levels of nested loops, 6,060 business rules and 9,340 paragraphs. Faced with a homogeneous but extremely complex set of templates, Coexya carried out a semi-automated migration over 18 months, now in production, with decommissioning of the legacy solution planned for H1 2026.
A second chain with equally complex templates
On a second scope with equally complex templates (up to 1,400 loops, 3,200 business rules and 2,600 variables for the densest document), Coexya adopted a hybrid strategy combining rewriting for rationalisation with semi-automated migration. The first templates in this scope are due to go into production in 2026.
Alongside this, the programme mobilised seven cross-cutting workstreams: the CCM core platform, the design factory, communications governance, operations, testing, change management, and supplier management
A centralised solution with support tailored to each business scope
The ministry’s aim is to have a centralised CCM platform that enables processes and services to be shared. Alongside building this system, Coexya studied each scope (needs, usage, milestones and project trajectory) to define a cutover strategy tailored to each one. For some scopes, this led to semi-automated migration of document templates to the target system, enabling a fast and secure cutover using the Kami suite. For other needs, the migration was an opportunity to modernise the communications estate, and rewriting was preferred. Hybrid approaches combining semi-automated migration and manual rewriting were also proposed.
Success factors for a large-scale document production migration
- Engaged internal sponsors, safeguarding knowledge of stakeholders and related projects
- Strong stakeholder involvement, in a transparent approach enabling effective decision-making
- Collaborative work carried out without haste, combined with the progressive industrialisation of migration and testing
- Dedicated support on architecture choices (deployment on a non-standard OpenShift version), with new processes defined and specific tooling put in place to secure the version upgrade carried out in 2025
