I received a tender notice this week from one of the County Councils that have been using Livelink WCM for the past few years. They are inviting bids for a replacement WCM and the migration of their content from Livelink WCM to the new system. This is the third big Livelink user we've seen in the last 6 months looking for a new WCM and planning to move off the platform early next year. We've also noticed an increase in traffic to our site with keywords suggesting there is increasing interest in the alternatives to Livelink and the migration tools we have on offer to facilitate a smoother transition. We will be bidding one of our partner's WCM alternatives but will be highlighting our WCM migration tool as part of the bid. It's a shame that we can't offer the tool to the competition as well as we know that we can make the migration easier regardless of the target environment.

If you are interested in the options for replacing your Livelink WCM system or in how the mim:switch WCM migration tool can help you move to a new WCM then please feel free to get in touch.

I have just read a blog by Gerry McGovern on the CMS Wire site with the title Web Content Migration: Disastrous Strategy in which he talks of the common migration strategy of migrate everything that you can regardless of quality. I agree absolutely with Gerry's point of view and have been involved in some projects that sound just like his example. 

I have recently been talking to lots of our clients about migration given the current attitude towards Obtree/Livelink and one of my key 'Utopian' ideas is that you define your new content requirements and architecture with no reference to what you have. You decide what you need (ceteris paribus) and work back from there to design your migration logic and processes. In practise this is rarely possible for all sorts of reasons. Many years ago I worked as an Economist and much of the theory in that discipline falls down without the ceteris paribus constraint. Nevertheless, it is a good position to start from for migration projects.

I like Gerry McGovern, I was very impressed with him as a public speaker and he has real insight into the failings of web sites. I would like to cite him here...

'Why do we have such bad content?

1. We allow the organization to publish puff, fluff and vanity, instead of focusing on the needs of our customers/staff.
2. We don’t hire web content professionals. Instead we find the most junior person in the department and give them the job of managing the website.
3. We don’t see the Web as a unique medium-we just take print content and print thinking and shovel it onto the Web.
4. We don’t review and quality control. We have practically no processes to take old content off our website.'

I have just received a PQQ for a public sector consortium. I get a lot of these and I'm sure many many organisations do too. One of the most frustrating things about procurement is that it often costs the bidders a combined amount that exceeds the value of the contract but you just have to live with that. This one, however, asks for six paper copies and a CD version of the PQQ response. I am at a loss trying to understand why a PQQ needs to go to six people at all never mind the CD version. Surely these days public sector procurement departments could look at ways of limiting the impact on the environment of their activities not to mention the cost to small businesses.

While I'm having a mini rant on the subject I did have a wry smile last week when I received another PQQ by email and the text included a request; if I did not intend to proceed with the PQQ could I return the Word document that was attached to the email. Luckily we have gone forward with that one and I don't need to send my hard drive to ensure I am complying with procurement regulations.

Nothing about WCM migrations or WCM development today. Fans of football around the world recognise Diego Maradona as one of the game's greatest ever players and he arrived in Glasgow for the first game as Coach of Argentina against Scotland tomorrow night at Hampden Park. Apparently the Tartan Army are to present Maradona with an award as Player of the Year 1986 the year in which he scored two of football's most famous goals against England in the quarter finals. The first was the now infamous 'hand of god' goal which saw Maradona score with his hand and get away with it. The second was a sublime solo effort (a bit like Archie Gemmill's) that would be in most people's top 5 of all time. Except perhaps the Scotland assistant coach. Terry Butcher has said he cannot forgive or forget Maradona's 'cheating'. Should be a good friendly match then.

A while back Mimtech were engaged by Applied Works ( http://appliedworks.co.uk/) to provide RedDot and Flash skills for a series of changes to the Save the Children's site for the Kroo Bay project ( www.savethechildren.org.uk/kroobay).  The site had been designed by STC and Rufus Leonard (www.rufusleonard.com/) and a first version built. The second round of development fell to Applied Works, who are a design agency, and they brought Mimtech in to do RedDot and Flash work (we got some Flash experts from North Colour (www.northcolour.com)).

The site has won the RedDot international award for best customer project at the RedDot Days event in Frankfurt. The following is a quote from the RedDot site...

'Open Text Web Solutions Group presented Save the Children with its international award for best customer project during RedDot Days in Frankfurt 28th-29th October. The award has been given for Save The Children's Kroo Bay website, www.savethechildren.org.uk/kroobay, which uses the Web Content Manager and Asset Manager modules from the Open Text Web Solution powered by RedDot. The site was launched to give UK families an in-depth, interactive experience by enabling them to connect directly with a slum community in Sierra Leone, to engage people with Save the Children's wider campaign, and to raise £100,000 to help transform the slum'

Well done to the many parties involved in the site but particularly to Save The Children for making it happen and their patience with all of us 'consultants' during the development.

Well, it looks like I'm off again touting the mim:switch Livelink WCM migration tool. This time I'm off to Switzerland to the Open Text customer day in Zürich. Not as glamorous as it might seem as the conference is at a hotel at the airport so I won't even get the usual taxi ride view of the city.

As I'm sure most readers are aware, the Livelink WCM PS started life as Obtree and was created in Switzerland where there are well over 100 organisations still using the WCM. Although the day is for all Open Text customers a good number are expected to be Obtree users and there is a presentation specifically for them. I was asked if our WCM migration software could be demo'ed at this session and I am packing my bags.

I am looking forward to meeting up with the Swiss partners involved in the migration methodology planning. We have made do with teleconferences since we met in Hamburg in August and getting round the table makes it easier for me to disguise the fact that their English is better than mine – and to make some further progress on the upgrade path from Obtree to RedDot.

My daughter likes me to go on these trips too. She misses me of course but gets a new football strip to show off at her club when I get back. Now I just have to decide which team to get FC Zürich or Grasshoppers. 

This morning I presented to a panel of judges as part of the John Logie Baird Awards. We were flattered to be invited given the number of applications and look forward to finding out if we can progress to the final.

I was talking about the innovative aspects of the mim:switch WCM to WCM mifgration software and why it is a better option than the competition for migrating from one web content management system to another. It was the first time that I had presented the software to a non technical audience and really made me focus on what is good about our software. There are two main things that make mim:switch attractive; it is fast and it leaves nothing behind.

We ran some tests against a clients events application. The application has about 2500 events and to migrate manually with copy and paste would take about 15 minutes per event which equates to about 100 days. mim:switch managed to create all the new pages, add the content and all metadata and place them in the site structure in less than 1 hour. Imagine how much time and cost will be saved in migrating a site of 20000 or 30000 pages.

Earlier this week RedDot held their annual user conference (RedDot Days) in Frankfurt. Unfortunately we were unable to attend this year as we have too much work on here but we were pleased to be informed that Livelink WCM presentation server customers were being enticed to attend by the offer of a free onsite migration workshop to the first 10 to sign up. As readers of this blog will know I was part of the team that designed this migration workshop along with RedDot, Infocentric Research and Unic Internet Solutions representatives at a session in Hamburg earlier this year. I am still waiting to hear the results but look forward to the workshops. We have carried out similar workshops with UK based clients already as they move off the Livelink WCM PS platform.

The mim:switch Content Intelligence Tool is a key aspect of that work and it provides invaluable data to help prepare for migrating from Obtree or Livelink WCM PS. we are expecting to see migrations from Swiss and German users over the next few years but in the UK at least the move has started.

Apparently there is a new game in town, content intelligence. This is a 'new' discipline described as the meeting of content management and business intelligence. The concept is that content management has traditionally been concerned with unstructured data and business intelligence with structured data. I'm not sure I agree with that but what do I know?

I realise that this has actually been going on for some time and that some of what we do could easily be filed under the CI heading I thought it was interesting that a new buzz phrase is necessary but I guess it's not as bad as the description I heard about CI providing 360° vision on business data and text - whatever that means.

I have to get back to some out of the box green field blue sky planning to transform visionary paradigms in order to streamline leading-edge ROI and extend impactful synergies to help achieve brand distributed mindshare with the objective to productise proactive vortals blah blah blah...

Actually I think we might call our Obtree site analysis  tool the Content Intelligence Tool. How about that for adaptive commercialisation?

I am in the middle of a pre migration exercise and need a wee break so instead of doing it I am going to blog about it for a few minutes.

  Mim:switch Obtree site analysis tool.

Using the Mim:switch Obtree/Livelink WCM migration tool we have been analysing a site belonging to one of our customers. We have generated all the reports covering the number of objects,  orphaned and inactive objects, missing attributes, duplicates and slots that are populated and are now trying to complete the analysis document. Between this and the Google Analytics I have spent more time looking at statistics than any time since I was an Economist at the Scottish Office back in the 80's. 

St Andrew's House (Scottish Office)