Assisting business in migrating content

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More specifically, assisting the business in migrating content from an old HTML/ASP/ASP.NET website to a new SharePoint site.

These old site are probably 10 years old, filled with out of date data, poorly updated, with no owners or any accountable members. When migrating you want to provide the end users with the following

  • Content is current and updated regulary
  • Permissions are assigned and maintained
  • Content is easy to find
  • Content and site is inviting

in otherwords, everything that the current site is not providing!!

So how do you do it? Well, depending on your timelines, the following approach proved successful.

  • Identify the taxonomy of the new site
  • identify owners of each node of the taxonomy
  • Get them all in one room and prepare them for whats to come
  • Provide simple templates that will help the owners get content in the strucutre that matches the pre-defined taxonomy (define restrictions and governance rules of the sharepoint site)
  • Give the owners time to populate the templates with content (3 weeks seems ike a good amount of time on average)
  • QA the completed templates
  • Create the site structure based on taxonomy and completed templates.
  • Use trained data capturers to migrate the content from the template to SharePoint.
  • QA and Go live.
Seems like a bit of work, on average, this type of engagement takes about 10 weeks. depending on the size of the site being migrated.

it takes this long because it not a simple copy and paste, if we did that, all the faults of the old site will be carried over to the new site, and that will compramise user adoption.

If anyone else has been faced with the task, but had a different approach, let me know.

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