CMS Migration

When choosing a new CMS a customer’s primary concern is almost certainly authoring-based. That is to say, a clear vision for the future of content is established well before the vendor is chosen. There are many CMSs to choose from and they vary greatly in scope, functionality and ease of use. You may be faced with a large influx of new content which is no longer manageable under the current CMS; or you may come to the realization that your current vendor no longer supports your vision for your website in the functionality it supports (it’s not uncommon to find content authors use tricks to get around the limitations of your CMS); or you may simply be tired of that clunky user interface and want something with a little more pizzazz.

What’s not always considered is backwards compatibility with existing content. Ideally, undertaking a CMS migration into a new platfom represents a translation of data, resulting in the achievement of value. Otherwise, a content migration can leave you with a truncation of content resulting in a functional, but 'lossy' migration. Metadata management is incredibly useful on both sides of a website, internal and external. Content with good metadata is good content ie.  findable! It’s a good idea to have a strategy in translating both content and metadata from your source CMS into the target. It’s all too easy to favor new functionality and componentry in a new CMS over the simple-yet-invaluable little things.

CQ5 is a particular favorite of mine to work with but it’s my belief that a crack team is required to take full advantage of all the features CQ5 has to offer. Not everyone requires a CMS as flashy as CQ5 and there are plenty of other utilitarian options. One thing is clear: regardless of which CMS you choose,  it is imperative you understand what you’re getting in your CMS and that you are prepared to spend the time necessary to get the most out of your investment. We at Vamosa were recently faced with a client coming back to us after a brief disengagement only to reveal that they had decided that their chosen target system did not adequately meet their needs - after months of work on both sides. It’s hard to imagine a more tragic outcome than that! So be sure to take your time deciding which system is right for you, and good luck!










If you are unsure of what CMS is right for you, download the Vamosa Consulting Service CMS Vendor Selection Business Results Sheet and see how Vamosa may be able to help you.

Any enterprise looking to manage content knows it has a challenge on its hands. Not only has the volume of content exploded exponentially in the last few years but so has the rate at which content is changing and users’ expectation of a satisfactory experience, whether on the Internet, or simply locating a file on the Intranet or Portal.

Vamosa announced its new consulting services on Tuesday. They offer a comprehensive approach to implementing best practice Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG), focusing on practical aspects, such as content modelling and keyword tagging.

A Vamosa customer – British Council – summarized the need for such expertise perfectly: “We knew there was a lot of out-of-date content, but with so many pages, it was an enormous challenge for us to undertake an analysis on our own. We chose Vamosa because of its Consultants’ expertise.”

The Consulting services are structured around ten different components to provide enterprises with a start-to-finish content strategy, and the added bonus of providing an independent evaluation to support decisions on CMS vendor selection.

A few examples of the different areas of the Practice include:
•    Content Discovery – a comprehensive analysis and assessment of content to optimize performance, reduce Total Cost of Ownership and resolve problem areas before content users complain
•    Migration Programme Management – capitalizes on the expertise of Vamosa experts to migrate content so employees can focus on day to day jobs and avoid the common pitfalls associated with CMS/DMS implementation
•    Keyword Tagging – Valuable keywords and phrases extracted from content and weighted based on relevance, then tagged as metadata making it easier to find

By engaging with Vamosa for consulting services, enterprises can not only be confident of receiving advice gained on hundreds of customer engagements, but also that these will be executed within a structured ECoG framework.

As an experienced Consultant, I find it’s difficult to say when considering a data migration strategy which step in the process is most important. The success of a data migration methodology really depends on all the components of a solution working well from beginning to end. But it’s certainly true that a successful data migration project cannot take place without a robust means to push content into its new home, whatever that might be.

Since virtually every content management system (CMS) on the market is different, there is no silver bullet for loading content quickly and dependably. Each application programming interface (API) is different and can vary greatly in terms of quality style and completeness. Some may require a custom web service, deployed on the target environment and called remotely.

But this solution isn’t quite optimal. What if the client’s target environment is completely inaccessible for some reason? Perhaps the client’s security model forbids deploying foreign services. Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 CMS circumvents the necessity to deploy remote services with its client object model. After getting your hands on the required libraries the SharePoint 2010 API is suddenly at your fingertips. Using this technique, a data migration can be accomplished using a locally deployed custom service after supplying the required credentials!

While I found SharePoint’s client object model to provide a promising new way to connect to a CMS, I thought the API was incomplete and sometimes poorly documented. Luckily, the out-of-the-box web services packaged with MOSS provided the methods I required. I am excited at the prospect that more CMSs will start packaging up libraries that provide the tools necessary to connect to an environment with a remote machine. It simply provides a safer solution for the data migration and one that doesn’t require deploying anything on the client’s machines! The big upshot of the client object model implies that projects are less likely to face resource bottlenecks because additional access to secure systems is not required. A smaller gap between the development and testing periods allows more time for refinements and a better quality data migration solution.

It seems that Microsoft is leading the way in this regard.

  Download our Data Migration - Seven Steps to Success White Paper to gain a further understanding of the data migration best practices that should be considered when beginning a migration project.

Do you understand your content lifecycle? Do you even have a content lifecycle? A content governance model, such as Vamosa’s Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) framework is built around control and governance of content from creation, through consumption and on to retirement/archival or deletion. Implementing a governance model will make a huge difference to overall content quality, with streamlined processes resulting in a high percentage of well tagged, standards-compliant and relevant content. There are other benefits too: including cost reductions from increased efficiency; and reduced maintenance and storage requirements. The big question for Records Managers, Web Content Managers, Librarians and other professionals is ‘How can I start to apply this framework and regain control of the information in my organization?’.

Content has always been difficult to control due to its diverse nature and it should be no surprise that it’s not going to get any easier. This article from the eDiscovery Journal raises some of the issues facing organizations in the Web 2.0 era. Not only is legislation being tightened around how information can be used and how it should be retained within organizations, but the number of ways that information can be created has increased dramatically. In addition to the content residing within Content Management Systems (CMS) and email servers, organizations now have to consider the new breed of collaboration and social networking tools that are growing rapidly within the workplace. User-generated content featured in instant Messaging, Blogs, Twitter, Google Wave, Buzz etc. all make it possible for information to exist in a wide variety of locations, yet still “owned” by the company. This type of information cannot be managed or controlled using traditional methods.

Failing to appreciate the need for governance introduces risk and is one of the reasons why enterprise organizations find themselves in a situation where they lose control of their content. There is often no real understanding of either the quantity or the value of information existing within the network. Misleading information can seriously damage a company’s brand and customer service, while duplication can result in increased storage and infrastructure costs. Ultimately, this lack of control leads to an increase in the so called “digital landfill” and the first thing to suffer is content quality and, in due course, the end user experience.

So, where do you start? The first stage of the ECoG governance model is “Initiate”. This really is the stage where you have to plan your strategy and think about the content you need – whose going to use it and when; what are they going to do with it – and also what you can live without. Retention of obsolete or irrelevant information is one of the biggest factors contributing to uncontrolled growth of content within organizations. The Initiate phase fits extremely well with the implementation of a CMS for the first time, or as a ‘take stock’ point ahead of migration into a replacement CMS, but it can also be undertaken on the back of a thorough analysis of existing content. This is the perfect opportunity to rationalize content and ensure quality and relevance are high before populating the CMS. A CMS will only manage content, it won’t deliver governance. For that you need a strategy and policies covering the end to end content lifecycle – ensuring that you not only obtain a high level of content quality, but maintain that level, in order to maximize the value of your information assets.

Content Migration is complex; it is not simply a case of ‘lifting and shifting’ content from one content management system (CMS) to another. Web content is often inconsistently structured and spread across multiple locations and sites.

With this in mind, there is a growing requirement for content to be analyzed, enhanced and standardized prior to migration. The cost involved in manually reviewing and migrating content can be significant; but it can be minimized through the use of software to perform automatic analysis and migration – a solution recently provided by Vamosa for the Department of Health and Ageing of Australian Government (DoHA).

DoHA needed to migrate from their legacy CMS to IBM WCM within just eight weeks in order to achieve better control of their internet sites. Vamosa recommended a solution that involved an automatic cleanup and enhancement of their content. This process firstly involved identifying all of the content that was required to be migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer Vamosa Expert Services gained a clear understanding of DoHA’s content inventories and content management activities. The results showed that DoHA had 40 static websites containing 50,000 ‘must have’ pages that were to be migrated.

Vamosa Content Migrator then extracted all of the required content, copying it into the staging repository while allowing business to continue as normal for all DoHA’s employees. The next stage of the process involved exposing all of the content to Vamosa’s rules engine, Vamosa Content Quality Builder, allowing all of the content to be modified both for business requirements and to satisfy the requirements of the target system. The content was then loaded into the target system already ‘fit for purpose’ and ready for productive use.

Vamosa Content Migrator was used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required web content and linked documents to IBM Lotus WCM in the stated timescales. The Vamosa toolset in the migration process, compared with the manual alternative, lead to the project being completed

    * Four times faster
    * At a quarter of the price
    * With zero impact on day to day operations

When you create content, what happens to it? Does it get uploaded to your website, to be forgotten about, or become redundant over time?

Content has a life – and one that doesn’t stop when published. This is an oversight often made by many enterprises and organizations. Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is the process of taking content through its lifecycle, from initiation to creation, control and consumption. In fact, there are sixteen stages in this lifecycle.

Phase 1 is to initiate, or in other words manage change requests. At this stage, you need to prioritize content, authorize and make decisions as to deleting old, redundant files or creating new ones.

Then you move onto Phase 2, creating the content: authoring, tagging and authorization. Phase 3 is where control is applied. Content is structured and migrated to a CMS. During this process, rules and policies need to be applied to ensure content adheres to both internal and external guidelines (such as branding and legislation).

The last phase deals with the usage of content: its findability, managing your assets, monitoring and maintaining content. At this point you might decide that changes need to be made. Perhaps your content is now out-dated or not needed, taking you back to Phase 1: requests to change content.

Throughout this journey changes must be authorized and rules and policies must be applied. You must be clear who in your organization holds the decision-making powers and what rules what is important for your organization to govern your content.

To help you indentify where you experience challenges managing the life of your content, we’ve created an Enterprise Content Governance Framework. It also conveniently shows where Vamosa tools can be used to automate tasks at each stage.







To understand further how you can achieve effective Enterprise Content Governance and  improve content quality in five steps download the Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality White Paper.

In Part 1 of this series, we highlighted the hidden challenges of merging digital content in the context of an acquisition. Acquired content often undercuts unsuspecting organizations by delivering blows across a range of exposed areas: from the content itself, to the technology on which it is served, to its audience – whether employees or customers. In this issue, we explore some of the solutions Vamosa provides to help organizations overcome these integration challenges and achieve their acquisition objectives.

Branding of Acquired Properties

The most obvious way in which acquired content negatively impacts an organization is by eroding its corporate identity. This is most apparent in the case of branding assets: logos, color palettes, and font choices, but many more signals of incomplete integration lurk below the surface. These signals may be acute but unobtrusive – contact email addresses pointing to pre-acquisition domains, obsolete product names – or subtly pervasive – material at sharply different reading levels, non-compliance with adopted accessibility and web standards. Through a combination of services and technology, Vamosa allows organizations to close the brand gap and ensure brand governance standards are adhered to. Taking advantage of Vamosa’s policy-driven rules engine, our Consultancy practice can design and configure a tailored package of content policies using Vamosa's ECoG Suite for Web, precisely targeting an organization’s most pressing content issues.

System Consolidation

It’s easy for companies to make a connection between public content and sales, but the burden of supporting post-acquisition content has deep implications for costs as well. While there are clear – and important – differences between content management systems, all are designed to facilitate the flow of information in a collaborative environment. That’s fine as a concept using one CMS but when you have multiple Content Management Systems – be careful, it can actual restrict collaboration. Reducing the number of content management systems required by the combined organization benefits both production and consumption; at a business level, this translates into elimination of sources of waste: licensing fees, hardware, lines of application code. Vamosa’s ECoG Suite for Web – with or without the deployment of our Consulting practice – allows organizations to accurately size their potential savings through systems consolidation, and then achieve them through migration into a unified platform. When decommissioning systems is not an option, Vamosa’s ECoG Suite for Web can apply metadata dimensions to content in place, enabling portal integration to make content findable or push it directly to relevant consumers.

Users of Content – Enabling Access

Lastly, acquisitions yield major challenges for the users of content. In the context of restructuring a company, it’s common for content ownership to change as departments are split and merged, and much of the content itself – internal HR documents, mission statements, functional group sites – is likely to become redundant or irrelevant. At an access level, reorganization manifests itself in changes to security groups. People often focus on security’s role in preventing information from getting into the wrong hands, but it’s just as important to ensure that new employees are quickly granted access to company information; neglecting this basic privilege is likely to precipitate a morale nosedive. Vamosa’s family of products and services allow business to quickly identify and eliminate swaths of redundant content while at the same time updating links to point to their corresponding active pages. Additionally, Vamosa’s ability to reassign content to new owners or groups ensures that information is editable by and available to the proper channels, breaking down barriers to collaboration and empowering an organization to be greater than the sum of its parts.








To learn more about CMS consolidation and CMS Migration, down the Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success White Paper.

While sitting with a customer recently I feared I was sounding like a broken record.  I wrestled over should I let this topic go that did not sit right with me?  As a supplier to this important customer, was it my duty to agree to a requirement that I knew would result in business resistance or should I highlight the consequences of implementing the perceived solution?

With resources readily available, through the internet, it is more common to come across customers who have already ‘self-diagnosed’ what they require from you even before any engagement has taken place.  With over 11 million hits coming back on the internet when you enter “content migration” into Google, the logic as to why this is such a popular search term for 2010 is apparent: the trend demonstrates that customers needs to find out more about content migration before approaching a CMS vendor and prior to selecting the best practice migration approach in order to ensure the best solution is delivered. ‘Surely’ – they tell themselves – ‘I can apply the same logic to selecting the best migration vendor as I would to (say) purchasing a car or house?’

Here lies the challenge for both the customer and the vendor; self diagnosis can be dangerous for both the success of your project and the future health of your web content; as the challenge of migrating content is a complex one.

I believe what sets Vamosa apart is how seriously we take our responsibility to perform a relevant and credible diagnosis for all customers.  All symptoms are identified before we progress to designing a solution.  During this diagnosis we discuss the consequences of such decisions and allow the customer to see potential negative effects for their end customer and also the impact this might have upon the acceptance of their new portal environment.

For this particular client, the self-diagnosed solution was to manually clean up 90% of their content post migration. However, the recommended solution was to clean up this content through an automated approach prior to the migration, helping to save both time and money.  The result for me was helping a customer with surfacing critical issues prior to the migration.  Finding the correct parameters to resolve these issues helped them to achieve a successful project. This is the way I have established long lasting relationships with all Vamosa customers during my seven years at Vamosa. Trust and understanding are key to a successful project.

Download the Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success White Paper to further understand the business benefits of taking a planned approach to content migrations.

Charles Darwin came up with an interesting theory back in the early 1800s: a theory that has stood the test of time. It remains pretty contemporary, doesn’t it?

The idea that species propagate and thrive as a function of how well they are adapted to their immediate environment is maddeningly simple. Yet, it was major challenge to the thought leaders of the time.

Charles Darwin was a man of many talents. He is remembered today mostly for one achievement, and his true brilliance lay in his vision. He saw a pattern in evolution, he noticed the process of survival and came up with a concept which, latterly has been referred to as ’survival of the fittest’.

Taking a step back, what does Darwin’s theory of natural selection have to do with Enterprise Content or Information Management? Exactly what it had to do with selective retention of species! Content, Content Management Systems, Content Governance and Content Migration solutions are all subject to these laws. Given enough time, nature will play its part and the best adapted to its environment will survive.

In the recent decade, we have been through an information revolution of sorts. We have a slew of CMS vendors out there, at different levels of maturity and suitability. The rate of their evolution is a complex function of market forces and hard to predict. You may migrate from a system today to what seems most promising for your future. It is entirely possible (and not that uncommon) that you may have to go through the same process in as short a period as 2-4 years.

To take the lead from Darwin, what pray is the next, natural evolutionary step -the criteria that are not a CMS differentiator today, but are likely to be in 5 years time? I would like to suggest that it will be building metrics and features to provide a robust content governance infrastructure. After all, the quality of your message should be at the core of your desire to advertise it. This is a fast growing field, with many vendors producing applications with a smattering of the features necessary to support Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) goals. It is an exciting landscape; however there seems to be but few players with a laser focus on the ECoG objectives. So, next time you look at your content strategy, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to my corporate brand guidelines?
• Do I have a way to ensure that my content is setup to best position us for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to the latest HTML standards?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content adequately protects sensitive, corporate data?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content does not use any inappropriate language?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to accessibility standards?

Most CMS vendors have their hands full with different questions, and are not able to provide satisfactory answers to these for a while to come. Good luck with stepping back and asking questions that will help define a content strategy that is stable, robust and built for survival!


In order to ensure you have a well define content strategy before migrating to a new CMS, download the 'Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success' White Paper.

We like a challenge at Vamosa, so when a major pharmaceutical company contacted us recently to discuss migrating their entire Intranet portal we were immediately interested. This was an ‘all or nothing’ situation for the customer, as both an internal project team and the CMS vendors themselves had already tried and failed to migrate the sites.

These previous failures didn’t scare us off however and actually made us keener to prove to the customer that Vamosa software and Expert Services consultants could actually achieve what they were beginning to think was impossible.

Being confident in our abilities, we agreed to deliver a two week proof of concept to demonstrate that we could move content, digital assets, metadata, portal navigation, portal structure, portlet placement and security (i.e. everything!) from the existing source system to a new target. The content, currently stored within Interwoven TeamSite with a WebLogic Portal front end, was moving to a new Oracle Publisher CMS with WebCenter Interaction as the portal front end.

The PoC was difficult, as we were pushing the boundaries of what was previously considered part of a content migration and literally creating an entire portal – with content and structure – automatically from scratch. So, a difficult two weeks, but ultimately very successful, leading to some gasps of amazement from the internal technical team when we ran through the whole process over a WebEx meeting. Needless to say, we won the piece of work for the full Intranet migration.

And then the next challenge: because so much time had been spent trying to figure it out before Vamosa became involved, there was very little time left to actually migrate the Intranet portal before the proposed go live date! Luckily we have years of experience in delivering content migrations to very strict deadlines, so were able to plan an approach with the customer and successfully execute the migration of 18 large sites on schedule and with a content freeze measured in hours rather than days.

This type of migration, very complex and with tight timescales, is only possible using the power and flexibility of Vamosa Content Migrator. Other migration frameworks can’t cope with this level of complexity and are restricted to moving only the CMS content and normally in quite an inefficient way. Content Migrator uses the core APIs of the target web portal and CMS and as a result achieves high performance through a reliable and secure interface provided by the portal and CMS vendors.

So, the moral of the story is: don’t be scared of a challenge, confront it head on with the right team and nothing is impossible!







Download the 'Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success' White Paper to further understand the steps required to achieve a successful migration project.