Content Migration

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.

Research shows that 85% of acquisitions are a failure in the eyes of the acquirer and one of the most common reasons: a lack of post-acquisition planning.

Buying another company and truly integrating it into your business is an operational challenge. Acquirers need a precise view of the shape and size of the integration plan and the more detail you can articulate then the quicker those acquisition benefits can be realized for your shareholders.

Many integration issues have been addressed in copious lines of print: sales channels, commission structures, accounting systems, headcount strategy, reporting structures, contracts, tax rates, surplus assets, IT Systems – the list is endless. However there is a new area emerging that is dangerously invisible to the Board – Digital Content integration. The world’s digital content is doubling every year and the lack of Governance applied to enterprise content is having a serious business impact on corporations worldwide including: expensive e-discovery audits, executives searching for, but not finding content, inability to migrate and merge content, duplication of content, conflict or breaches of corporate standards, or even a complete lack of standards altogether.

All of these issues are only compounded within the pressure cooker environment of a merger.

We have listed below the top big 8 issues we come across in our work at Vamosa:

1. Content acquired ruins your consistent messaging and corporate identity.
2. New logos are placed all over the new web properties you acquired.
3. Numerous competing Content Management Systems (related to systems that perform the same tasks) results in inefficiencies such as high operating costs.
4. A significant (could be as high as 60%) amount of duplicate content keeps the cost of content ownership high.
5. Content needs to be reassigned as organizational structures change above it.
6. Portal integration should follow quickly after the targeted company has been acquired. However integrating unfamiliar content into an existing portal can stunt integration.
7. Ownership of an Enterprise Content Governance framework is essential to give leadership to content authors.
8. Staff morale can drop rapidly within an acquired company if basic content retrieval, intranet usability and the quality of web sites deteriorates.

In future editions of this blog series we will explore some practical, in-depth solutions. As a taster – here are the headline solutions:

Issue	Solution
Branding of properties	The role of Vamosa Consulting Practise and Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web
Systems Consolidation	Vamosa's ECoG Suite for Web and interaction with Vamosa's Consulting Practise
Redundant and Reassigned Content	Using Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web to eliminate waste
Portal Integration	The deployment of Tagging technologies and how they integrate with Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web
Governance Frameworks	How to implement Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) to extract real value from your content

To learn more about how to overcome these M&A challenges and how to ensure brand governance is maintained visit the Vamosa M&A page.

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.