Content migration can be the ugly, dark side of deploying a content management solution, whether you are deploying Microsoft SharePoint 2007 inside the firewall, or a solution like Sitecore to manage your public sites.
FYI - Our whitepaper, Planning for Success: Best Practices in CMS Governance, discusses migration and other non-technical considerations critical to CMS deployment success in more detail.
When content migration is not fully taken into account during the planning process, it can end up being:
- Painful
- Expensive
- A never-ending death march
- All of the above
Anticipating content migration costs is critical, especially in a recessionary environment.
The Four Fates of Existing Content
In thinking through how content will be migrated to a new site or intranet, a decision needs to be made regarding the fate of each content item. Most organizations will need to make hard decisions about which content will be migrated to the new site. There are four possible categories for content:
- Content to be migrated “one-to-one”. In this scenario, content is replicated in the new site exactly as it lives in the existing site.
- Content to be eliminated. This content will not appear at all within the new site.
- Re-written or restructured content. Content that will require significant rewriting or restructuring as part of the creation of the new site.
- Content elimination and replacement. Content that will be eliminated and replaced by new content, written specifically for the new site.
The challenge lies in deciding which content falls into which category. This is not a technical challenge; it is an editorial challenge. And it is critical.
You need to take into account at least six factors when making this decision. This next posts in this blog series discuss:
- The demands of the new information architecture
- The popularity of the content (today)
- The importance of the content to your organization’s objectives
- Whether content is considered “mandatory” for other reasons
- The degree of consistency in coding of the current content
- The presence of self-contained micro-sites