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. 

 

 

 

 

 

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

50.5 hours or 228 days - what would you choose?

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.

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.

 

Yesterday Louis and I attended the annual EPiServer customer and partner day in London. The event was surprisingly well attended with about 300 delegates. We were treated to some excellent presentations, a look at some of the very cool new modules for EPiServer (CMO, SEO etc), a tour of version 6 and a great lunch. These events are often a bit dull and pointless. Not so yesterday's event. Next year I hope we will be able to find the time to go out to the big event in Stockholm as well as the UK event.

I happened to be going to London on Monday for the EPiServer Partner and Customer Day when I received an invitation to go and meet with Kapow Technologies. Dominic Dunkley was kind enough to give me a product tour at their London offices and I have to say it is very cool. What impressed me most was the interface and the ease of use for less technically minded users. As I become further removed from 'actual' development work (apparently my time is 'better used on other areas of the business' !!) these kind of tools are increasingly attractive. Check them out at http://kapowtech.com/. 

The new Stirling Castle site went live this week. Well done to Chandra and his team for all the hard work and to the guys at Line for the fantastic designs.

The site has been built in Livelink WCM PS (that's Obtree to me) but with the functionality all done in .Net so that it can move easily onto a new platform should HS decide to move at some point in the future.

I particularly like the interactive timeline.

Well it's all gone to plan so far (more or less - one small glitch last Thursday but that's a lesson learned for the next one) and all six of the Salford sites are into RedDot. Just the tidy up to do on the main site and then hand over for QA. We expect the five smaller sites to go live this week, the big one will take a little longer to QA and catch up with the content freeze backlog.

We have also been receiving a lot of inquiries about the migration service. Salford City Council have been gracious enough to permit us to use this project as a case study so that will be produced and circulated very soon.