The Steven Seagal sequel that remained on the cutting room floor?
Not quite.
Elsewhere on these pages, Lewis described the process of moving from Notes to Umbraco from a technical perspective. To complete the picture, I wanted to describe how it looked from a content angle.
Dale has described us folk on the content side as being 'dedicated', in the sense that we focus on content, but the prospect of embarking on a manual process of moving 3,000 pages and many more attachments and images from Notes to Umbraco required dedication of a different kind. It was pretty attritional at times, and led to Lorna and me developing an acute Monster Munch habit, which we've both now kicked. Well, I know I have...
Anyway, back to the start.
In part 1 of this post, Lewis has described how we came to the inescapable conclusion that we needed to put a stake through the bespoked heart of the Notes CMS we were using. We groaned somewhat at the realisation that any migration would have to be a manual one, but cheered out loud when Lewis showed us how (relatively) straightforward this would be in Umbraco.
We set aside a month (March 2013) for two of us to move everything across, with the first two weeks in April built in as sanity-saving contingency. And so it was that, on March 1st, we met in a small room in a council building in Ludlow, took a collective deep breath, gulped some of my strong coffee (which Lorna decided very early on she didn't like), and got started.
It rapidly became apparent, despite initially intending to migrate like-for-like due to the 'challenging' time constraint, that this was a unique opportunity for a significant culling of content. We fully intended to finesse it all post-migration, but we couldn't resist. What we ultimately wanted was a site with as few pages as possible, with these pages being as short and to the point as possible, written in plain English, and encouraging our customers to self-serve wherever possible.
Over the course of several years, our site had become ridden with pages hosting essays on the technical nature of the work of our services, only of interest to the services themselves, and likely to completely alienate our audience. These went, without hesitation. Other pages hosted 30+ attachments, which again, when opened, would typically display flowcharts to confuse a nuclear physicist, PowerPoint presentations excitedly promoting a 'new' initiative from 1991...you get the idea.
So, wherever possible, we added call to action buttons to interact more efficiently with our customers...
...we brought hundreds (thousands?) of links up from the bottom of the page and into the text, we universally restyled the content to make it warmer, more inclusive and less officious, and we made major restructuring decisions to enable our information to be presented more logically.
But it was a balancing act. Opening the attachments to check whether they should be migrated, and generally adding quality control to the process of simply migrating, took time, and we didn't have any. The days lengthened to compensate, the Monster Munch consumption increased, and we drank more coffee that one of us didn't like. The flipside was that ultimately, because of the cull, we didn't migrate 3,000 pages. By the end, it was somewhere close to 1,500, so that aspect allowed us to catch up with the schedule.
In the end, we got it done, and miraculously, as we entered our April contingency period, we were joined by three new team members, Cait, Jane and Jue, which helped enormously in hitting the deadline, if only because it didn't feel any longer like it was just two of us trying Canute-like to hold back the tide.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, that of having to manually migrate because your existing platform is just too bespoked to allow any practicable automated solution, then be aware that it's hard work but ultimately really rewarding. It gave me a true sense of ownership of the new site and content, a deep and enduring love of Umbraco, and it was undoubtedly the piece of work I was most proud of last year.
A year on, we're still running a centrally edited website, with a team of three managing content requests, working with customers throughout the council to develop their web presences, and, when time allows, scanning pages to ensure that they remain clear, concise, informative, interactive and, fundamentally, that they do what our customers need them to do.