I have been involved in content migrations for EMG and its clients and a few in my earlier jobs as well. Some of them wanted to migrate from a database driven custom CMS to a ECMS product, Some wanted to migrate from a Database driven CMS to another Database driven CMS tool and some others were not sure of which way to go except for the fact that they wanted to move from their current CMS. Bottomline for all these migration scenarios is the client wants a better Website or Intranet (as the case may be) that gives the client more mileage.

Whatever the case maybe there are some common factors for content migration that will determine the complexity of the entire process.

1. Origin of Content / Content Repositories  - The simplest scenario will be to migrate from a well defined relational database to the new system. But, this is never the case. There are always multiple systems from where the content originates – it could be a combination of one or more of the following : database systems, flat file, legacy systems, another content management system etc. The complexity of the migration process increases with the number of content sources.

2. Content Quality – One of our clients had their navigation system in imagemaps, thankfully, they did not want to migrate the existing navigation system as-is. In another instance, when we were automating a migration from flat files, we found that the HTML files did not follow any template and some of them were missing values for fields that were mandatory on the new system. So, we had to do a partially automated migration.

3. Content Types and Amount of content– Content Type could be text, Documents, Media etc. In a manual migration, Amount of content to be migrated will play a major factor.

4. Upgrade existing system – So far, I have not come across a scenario where the client wanted to do an as-is migration. There has been a substantial upgrade – either by defining additional fields, additional value add by implementing Search Engine Optimization, Information Rearchitecture, content cleanup etc. The complexity of migration will obviously increase with more value adds to the existing system.

5. Users, Roles and Business workflows - Mapping the users, roles and business workflows from the as-is system to the new system is a time consuming process. Sometimes we may have to redefine the mapping if the new system does not support the working of the as-is system.

Method of migration – Based on the above factors, we should be able to figure out if we can do a completely automated migration, completely manual migration or a combination of automated and manual migration.

The entire process will be successful only if we keep the actual “freeze” time (change over from the old system to the new system) within acceptable limits.