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

[Hilary Marsh]

Hi Vic,

As others have said, there really isn't a way around the manual effort of this.

I am currently working on a very similar project. I'm leading a team 
of 3 or 4 (depending on the week) folks in migrating a static public 
website into Interwoven TeamSite. It took us 4 weeks to do the 
initial migration of about 1,500 pages.

Although the content inventory was complete, the site owner had not 
really identified all of the elements that needed to be built into 
the content entry templates (DCTs, in TeamSite-speak). Therefore, a 
lot of our work during the first week needed to be redone. In 
addition, we were applying CSS styles instead of the manual code that 
was used before, and we continually discovered new styles that needed 
to be defined and developed, which also caused substantial rework.

I'm sure we will find more inconsistencies in the QA phase, but it's 
certainly a good start.

As far as tips, I have only one: the more thoroughly the content and 
the page behaviors are understood before the migration effort starts, 
the more efficient the migration can be.

An interesting note: Two years ago, I worked on this client's first 
Web-based intranet. They had been using a PROFS system originally 
built in 1987. For that project, my team set up a migration map and 
someone was able to write a script that migrated all the content from 
the old system into TeamSite templates. The actual migration happened 
overnight...although each content owner had to go in and do 
substantial reformatting of all of their content. That scripting is, 
apparently, not possible from HTML into a CMS.

I would be happy to share more details.

Best,

Hilary



-------------------

From: "Vic Case" <viccase at visionspan.com>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 21:02:53 -0600
Subject: [Sigia-l] Converting static pages in a large intranet site to CMS

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?
-- 
Hilary Marsh
president, content company inc
plan  *  create  *  manage
http://www.contentcompany.biz
(708) 445-3466
download our latest presentation, "Demystifying Content Management Software"
http://www.contentcompany.biz/demystifying_cms.html.