[Sigia-l] Converting static pages in a large intranet site to CMS

[Donna Maurer]

Was very tired before, so now I'll provide you with a decent response.

I have worked on a couple of these projects and have yet to see a site that can just be 
converted. Really, if you are moving to a CMS, you should be taking advantage of 
some of the automatic functions included. If you are going to put that much effort into 
converting your content, you should put some effort into making the site more usable 
at the same time. OK, maybe you have done this, and are converting something that is 
pretty good, but if not, stop now and think about how you might improve it. You might 
save yourself a heck of a lot of effort.

Mostly, this is an organisation and management exercise. If it is not you, find someone 
who is fantastic at arranging detail & get them on board for the planning & 
organisation. There will be a huge difference in the way that you arrange this 
depending on whether you have distributed authorship or centralised. If you have 
distributed authorship, don't underestimate the amount of time you will need to train 
authors and hand-hold.  Do it a chunk at a time - find something that currently works 
well (maybe it is well written or well coded) and try it first. Learn from that experience 
and tackle the rest later. Figure out how you are going to release in sections and how 
you'll manage broken links. Stop part way through and reflect on lessons learned for 
the rest of the process...

What, you were looking for a technical solution? The amount of time any technology 
will save you is tiny compared to what good planning & management will save ;)

Donna



On 9 Feb 2004 at 21:02, Vic Case wrote:

> I'm on a project to convert thousands of intranet site pages (done in
> FrontPage) to Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS). Naturally,
> we'd like to minimize the manual labor in converting these pages. Does
> anyone have any tips or guidance to share about such a conversion
> effort?
>