How-To: Migrating Content to Vignette Version 7 (Part 2)

By Sandip Mane (@Luckthelady) Sep 24, 2007

When we left off from part one in this series, we mentioned that there are four steps involved in the content life cycle migration process — analyzing the content, deciding on a migration approach, the actual migration and post-migration processing. Here in part two, we go into detail on the Content Analysis step.

Migration Process — Analyze Content

This step analyzes content that will be present in the to-be V7 system as well as existing V6 content.

Content analysis defines content migration scope at detailed level. It tries to identify what content in V6 need to be migrated and how it will get migrated. This step also involves finding feasibility of content for automated migration versus manual migration.

Output of Content Analysis:

List of V7 system content instances that can be migrated from V6 system.
List of V7 Content Types that can be mapped to V6 content and hence migrated through an automated process.
List of V7 Content Types that need to be migrated through manual process.

Content analysis is a 2 step process.

Process to identify content for migration
Process to find feasibility of content for migration

Process to identify content for migration

This step identifies all the content pages on the site that require migration from V6 to V7.

Content in an organization, that is going to be available in the new V7 system can be categorized as:

New Content Type in V7 – Content Types that are newly defined in the V7 system and were absent in the V6 system. Ex. New site decided to put news items on the site and decided to use new Content Type for the same.
Modified Content from V6 – Content present in V6 is going to be modified or content formatting is changed.
Same as V6 – Same V6 content need to be present in the new V7 system.
Always New – Content is dynamic in nature and getting updated quite frequently on the site. This category is further subdivided as:
a. Old Data Required – Though content is getting replaced with new data, old data is required to be maintained for some time for site analysis or content search purpose.
b. Old Data Not Required – Old data is not required to be maintained for site analysis or content search purpose.

Out of the above 4 categories, first category does not need migration as content is newly defined (not present in old V6). Last three categories need to be analyzed in further detail to see how their content can be migrated.

Note that, content of type ‘Always New’ need to be migrated based on its frequency of updating and also if content is required in the new system as it is part of the site analysis or search criteria.

Content migration scope based on category is summarized in the table below:

Vignette Content Migration Diagram

Analyze all content available on the site for above content categories and categorize content pages accordingly. This will identify content that needs migration.

Sample Content category analysis format is illustrated below:

Suppose we are analyzing a content site having pages that display various offers and promotions for products available to the end user. Offers and promotions pages are organized as channels in V7 which are in turn displayed as menu levels to the end user.

Various Content Types used on these pages are Offer Summary, Offer Details, Promotion Event, Article, and MultiPage Article. ‘Application’ is a special keyword used to define application pages that are rendered by the server side logic and does not have any Content Type associated with it.