We are delighted to relate that our friends at Historic Scotland are up for some awards at The British Association of Communicators in Business (CiB) 2009 awards. The agency is in for several awards but the two we are most pleased by are 'Communications team of the year' for Linda and her team and 'Best website/microsite' for the Stirling Castle website (http://www.stirlingcastle.gov.uk/) a site which was built by Mimtech with the help of our design partners Line digital. We are looking forward to the awards dinner at the end of February and good luck to HS for all the categories in which they are shortlisted. 

We've got a new home!

234 West George Street,
Glasgow G2 4QY,
Scotland,
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)141 226 1666

Full contact details on our Office Locations page. 

Happy New Year to you all.

2010 looks like it's going to be a very exciting year for Mimtech and to kick things off we're moving to new offices. After four years in the Strathclyde University Incubator we're moving to our new home in West George Street in the heart of Glasgow's business area.

We'll post full details in a few days... watch this space.

0794 441 5000 or 0131 441 9642

Please use the above number to contact Mimtech during the Christmas/New Year week (Tuesday 29th - Monday 4th) as the office will be closed. Mim:care 'helpdesk' users can use our support extranet as normal. 

I heard a great phrase on the radio this morning that I thought I'd share. The programme was about the use of internet technologies and social media by governments and PR people to their own ends.

SPINTERNET

The arguement was along the lines that blogs, wikipedia, twitter etc. are being used to circumnavigate censorship rules and processes to 'put out' ideas and opinions that can't be made through other media. Not a new idea but a great word.

We've been over the figures and I thought it would be interesting to highlight a few metrics from our recent migration from Obtree/Livelink WCM to RedDot for Salford City Council.

We migrated 6 sites in total. Here are some figures from the largest of these www.salford.gov.uk. The site contained about 9000 pages and about 9500 digital files (images, pdf's etc). Using the mim:switch migration tool and our migration methodology we migrated all of this into RedDot. The live run created the new pages in RedDot, added all of the digital files to the RedDot CMS and updated all of the pages with the content and updated references (so that the images came from the CMS and the links to pages were correct for the new pages).The site structure was recreated automatically and all of the required metadata and custom property data were taken across. This took just 50.5 hours. Imagine creating 9000 pages manually. A very generous under-estimate might propose 15 minutes per page to create the page, upload the necessary images etc, add the text and metadata, make sure that links to other pages were changed to the new url check it's in the right part of the site. It would take 228 days to do what we did in 50.5 hours. And our tool doesn't get bored or  make human errors.

There is a lot more to any migration project than this of course, but this part is a requirement of any migration and the time/cost savings are pretty clear I think.

• c.9000 pages
• c.9500 digital files
• site structure
• updated links and references
• all required metadata

If you would like to find out more about this migration or how we might help you, please get in touch.

We have finished the migration of Salford City Council's Obtree sites to RedDot. Six sites have now gone live and are working well. The migration itself was, in my humble opinion, a resounding success. The issues we had were not technical but process and you can always learn from those for the next one. Well done to Chandra, Ken and the team for bringing this one in on time and budget. We are preparing a case study to document the project and will make the metrics available so you will be able to see how much more effective the mim:switch software is than the manual or other automated options.

We have already been commissioned to begin the next one and are in discussions about another two.

We are hoping to have the opportunity for a migration from Obtree to EPiServer soon (the test migrations to EPiServer are quicker than those to RedDot) and we are looking forward to that.

If you are a user of Obtree (Livelink WCM PS) and would like to know what options you have for migrating to a new platform please get in touch.

I have just read an announcement about the Open Text 2010 roadmap. This covered the full suite but the bit that caught my eye was...

'Open Text said that 2012 will see the release of a new Web Business app that combines Vignette content management tools with its own web solutions' (that's RedDot to you and me) '. This will create a platform and application framework with enhanced content modelling and "templating", richer in-context editing for non-technical users and faster web site deployment, according to the firm.'

My understanding is that RedDot and Vignette are built on very different technologies (I may be wrong) so I guess OT have a mammoth task ahead to join the two together. I'm interested to see the result.

Anharika was born on Tuesday 13th at 16:00, both mother and daughter are well and her daddy is obviously very proud. So he should be, she's a wee cracker!

We always knew that one day Chandra would prove to be a productive member of the Mimtech team ...only joking Chandra.

I have been away for a few days but the Salford City Council migration project has charged relentlessly towards a successful conclusion. The five smaller sites have all gone live and the main site is with the Council for UAT. There is still a bit of work to do at their end getting all of their forms, workflow processes etc in place but it looks like we have had a very successful project migrating the content of 6 sites from Obtree (Livelink WCM PS) to RedDot.

We are putting together all of the metrics from the project (number of pages, time to migrate, tolerance levels etc) into a case study which will be available once the project is signed off. In the meantime if anyone is interested in finding out more about our Obtree migration tool or would like to see a demo migration from Obtree to RedDot, EPiServer or Immediacy, please get in touch.