This is the last post in our short series discussing things you may want to consider in determining which content to migrate into your new content management solution and which to leave behind or restructure.
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.
In previous posts we’ve discussed:
- The demands of the new information architecture
- The popularity of the content today
- The importance of content to your organization’s objectives
- Whether content is considered “mandatory” for other reasons
This post closes our discussion by outlining two additional considerations.
Consideration Five: Ease of Content Migration
Structured content, — content that is already in a content management solution or is hosted by a database — can often be migrated automatically. Unstructured content must usually be migrated by hand, but manual migration is time-consuming and costly. Automated migration usually brings across all content in the structured system, regardless of whether it meets the other criteria we’ve discussed. Therefore, the cost of migrating specific content clusters should be considered in determining when, how and if to migrate this content to your new site.
Consideration Six: Is the Content a Self-Contained Micro-Site?
Many organizations have a central website surrounded by a constellation of micro-sites. These may have been created for good reasons, or they may have arisen more spontaneously because marketing was frustrated with the time it took IT to launch a site. Regardless of the motivation for their creation, you’ll need to carefully examine the purpose of each before the migration process begins. Often, organizations decide to reduce their reliance on micro-sites as they deploy a content management solution. This is because the CMS should allow for faster publication on the marketing side and micro-sites allow authors to avoid the specified workflow as well as other governance considerations enforced by the CMS.
It might not make sense to repatriate these micro-sites during the deployment of your flagship site in the new CMS. For the initial relaunch, consider delaying or grandfathering existing micro-sites and focus on core content.