Moving home

• Article 22 of 26
• M-iD, August 2005
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 1.4MB

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Switching platforms
More often that not, an organisation needs to migrate to a completely different platform, rather than move their existing system onto a more powerful server.

This is a bigger challenge, which is why any organisation contemplating such a move needs first to perform an audit to see exactly how much work will be involved: many people contemplating migrations often think that HTML content can simply be moved over 'as is', not realising that such a transfer is anything but trivial.

Any switch of technology will invariably require a rewriting of the majority of, if not all, existing web pages - particularly if they are 'dynamic' rather than 'static'. Even migrating relatively uncomplicated HTML pages to a new content management system will often require some cleaning up:

• Links will need to be re-written so that they correctly refer to new pages, with most modern content management systems having a link management system, rather than direct coding, to ensure consistency.
• To preserve valuable deep links from other sites, organisations should get the destination system to redirect surfers to the new URLs by maintaining a database of old links and their replacements.
• Image references will also need to be changed once they get added to the content management system's image library and extra data might be needed, such as image descriptions, dimensions, size, licensing rights and so on. This will always involve some degree of human interaction, something that should be considered when allocating resources and time.
• Adding metadata at this stage, particularly to meet e-government guidelines, might well be necessary - or might even be one of the main reasons for the migration. A fully automated approach may be possible with certain systems, although some degree of human input will probably also be necessary.

Web monkeys
David Macken, the managing director of public sector services supplier System Associates, says that the main challenge facing anyone attempting to cleanse old HTML pages is normally in how the original authors wrote the HTML in the first place - interpreting their code is never straightforward. “You're supposed to separate formatting from content [using stylesheets], but you'll always end up with a certain amount of embedded styles: people will want bullet points and so forth.”

Users will add HTML tags, often incorrectly, to format the content the way they want. When that content is added to the new system, however, this formatting is likely to override the new site's formatting, so needs to be purged or rewritten accordingly.

In the 1990s, many web sites were developed without the use of a content management system to streamline the storage of content and its presentation. Instead, they were almost entirely hand-coded by a handful of web developers. That can make the cleansing stage particularly problematic as the migration team struggles to understand the practices of the site's original developers - and all those that came after them. “The worst sites are ones that have been around for more than two years, especially those run without content management systems,” says Macken.

“The web team has had maybe 15 different members of staff over that time, all using different tools. Most of it is impossible to translate, particularly the stuff created by the Macromedia Fireworks application, which takes an image and chops it up - the last 5% of the HTML might be the paragraph that appears at the top of the page. It's a nightmare,” he says.

As a result, analyst group Bloor Research estimates that it costs as much as £10 to clean up just one existing web page for re-use in another system. Any kind of automated tool for cleaning up pages will therefore save a considerable amount of time and money.

Many content management systems have import tools, but frequently these require consultants to manage the migration process successfully. Vamosa's Content Migrator and Nahava's Content Re-engineering Solution are among the most powerful tools for automating data migration.

Vamosa's software, for example, was used by the Department of Health to migrate a 70,000 page site to the government's DotP content management system, while Nahava's has been employed successfully by FedEx among others. Any organisation that is looking to migrate its own content should evaluate such tools to see if they would work with their own sites: Vamosa claims it can save four-fifths of the time it would take to conduct a migration manually.

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