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Content Migrations: Not For The Faint Of Heart

A number of bloggers in the content management community have been buzzing about why Oracle recently migrated its internal and external blogs to Movable Type instead of one of its own tools. It's a fair question, but the migration is understandable, as Movable Type is a solid platform, and well-suited to the type of work they are doing. But I'm interested in a more pragmatic question: How did Oracle manage to migrate all of that content?

Probably the best analysis and commentary on the Oracle using Movable Type topic I've seen is from a post on CMS Watch's Trendwatch Blog, with the terrific title "Oracle doesn't eat its own blog food":

"... to be fair to Oracle, they are not the only ones -- many other product vendors use 3rd-party blog and wiki products for specific functionality. Blog migrations are never easy, but Oracle seems to have pulled it off successfully."

The last line (with emphasis added) is what struck a chord with me. I'd broaden that statement to say that migrating any sort of content is never easy. Fortunately, there are some good resources available to turn to for advice.

CMS Wire has a good piece on the topic with No Small Task: Migrating Content to a New CMS by Kyle Short. He states "content migration can often be the hardest part of implementing a new CMS" and he's exactly right. There's a lot more good advice here, and it's worth a read.

Alt Tags has a good post called Content Migration: Making It Successful that focuses on the strategy and planning aspect of preparing for a migration. Also useful is the list of content migration resources she links to in the post.

Finally, Step Two Designs, an Australian intranet and content management consultancy, has posted a detailed article titled Content migration: options and strategies. It's a good, insightful read that covers a lot of ground. Check out the rest of the site as well, as there are lots of other content management-related articles.

At the highest level, much of the advice from these resources boils down to a few key points: 1) Use the migration as an opportunity to clean up (and possibly delete) older content, 2) you can't put too much emphasis on the planning stage of a migration, and 3) always factor in plenty of time for the actual migration process. Conventional wisdom says that for a content-heavy site with a mix of manual and automated content migration you'll need months, not weeks.

Smooth migrations don't happen by accident, and whether you're running a blog with just a few dozen posts or a content management system with hundreds of thousands of items, proper planning can help avoid huge headaches.

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