Migratory patterns
- Article 20 of 26
- M-iD, July 2005
Shifting content from one system to another is never easy. But following a few key steps can ease the process.
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Any migration project needs to combine these separate pages into a single object. However, he adds that it may be more appropriate to have the transformation rules built into the final system, depending on the complexity of the transformation.
Quality assurance needs to be continuous during the migration, rather than at the end. Not only will that make it easier to identify problems, it will also make it easier to provide an audit trail. Unfortunately, there is no one set way of providing this kind of assurance and organisations will need to devise procedures appropriate to the different systems and data.
Macro 4's Frazer recalls one project that came close to migrating only 149 tapes of data out of the 150 tapes made because there were no records kept of the data produced by the customers during their export.
More worryingly, says IBM's Cadogan, simple “count them out, count them in” principles of assurance are unlikely to work since almost invariably, there will be some discrepancies between the indexing in a system and the number of objects, potentially because of corruption and other factors.
The final issue is the switchover. The organisation needs to decide how much downtime it is prepared to put up with. Planning a switchover to coincide with a weekend - or better still, a bank holiday weekend - usually provides enough time for the switch.
But a phased implementation of different aspects of the end system may be more helpful in certain situations. Trying to switch over quickly will often also require an abrupt change to different methods and processes, some of which cause the situation to become far worse if they go wrong.
Although migrating content from one system to another is by no means an easy task, if the proper procedures and processes are put in place and followed, it becomes a far more achievable project. While it may never be entirely trouble-free, it will at least be relatively painless.
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