Content Management Matters ™

Your team has gone through the initial discovery analysis and you have selected your new web content management system. All is going well as you kick off the planning until someone on your team asks, “What about the content migration?”

You look to your agency and they just shake their heads, your guys from IT are staring back at you wide-eyed and your CMS vendor stutters back in response, “Uh..uh..uh well, that’s usually the customer’s responsibility.”

Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corp., is a man who knows what he is talking about. If you don't believe me, just take a look at his bank balance.

He just published a White Paper on the implementation challenges presented by Content Management Systems as a whole. It ought to be required reading for boardroom-types, IT managers, webmasters -- just about anyone whose job entails management of digital content.

But for those just waking up to the fact that they need a CMS, and are fretting over the issues involved in getting it up and running, you might want to take a look.

It is universally known that a content management system is only useful when it has content to manage. Unfortunately, the problem of how to migrate content either into a new CMS or from one CMS to another is rarely considered ahead of time and is far from trivial.

This is the third and final article in our series on migrating content from a previous version of Vignette to Vignette V7. The first article in the series painted the broad overview and in the last article we talked in detail about the Content Analysis part of the process. Now, we continue by digging into the final planning phase: Defining the Migration Approach.

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.

Vignette revamped its Web Content Management technology with version V7 to adopt industry standards J2EE, XML and Web Services. While this move helped customers lower total cost of ownership by leveraging open standards and application server services, it posed new challenges in migrating existing sites running on earlier versions V5/V6.

V7 introduced an entirely new architecture, making V6 implementations almost obsolete. Customers going for the V7 platform have to model, design and rebuild the site.

Along with re-engineering the site, one of the most critical tasks in V7 migration is to rebuild the content into new V7 server from an old story server. As re-creating the whole site content is quite a tedious task, customers might wonder if there is any way out.

Vamosa, which received accolades for its "cool" factor in the ECM sector (there's a cool factor?), has decided to spread the love.

The content migration pros will be hosting free webinars for people seeking to learn more about analysis and migration tools for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The webinars start this month and last through the end of 2007. You'll get online demonstrations of the Vamosa content and document store analysis and migration offerings, along with info on how to conduct successful migrations yourself.

Register for a webinar at the Vamosa website.

As we have covered recently , content migration is a hot and serious topic for many IT managers. Migration from Lotus Notes to Microsoft SharePoint, a heretofore unfulfilled niche in the market, appears to have been filled by Proposion Software.

You can never quite escape the high school popularity contest, and that's okay as long as you're on the winning team. Gartner, a technology analyst firm with worldwide accolades, just labeled Vamosa a Cool Vendor in Content Management. Vamosa is a market leader in processing, analysis and content migration. This comes hot behind Vox's acquisition of a Shiny Media award for Best Web 2.0 Innovation, kicking off awards season in the enterprise content management world.

Vamosa recently announced the availability of v2.9 of Content Migrator, their content analysis and migration software. This newest release brings even better document migration and adds increased link cohesion capabilities.

This is the first time that Vamosa has introduced the concept of ‘link cohesion’ to the document world, although it has been a popular feature of "Vamosa Content Migrator and has been used when migrating web content to translate all internal website hyperlinks." By bringing this feature to documents now, it will be a boon to companies that have large document and content archives in transition.