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. Apparentlt 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. 

A Glasgow woman goes to the dentist and settles down in the chair. "Comfy?" asks the dentist.
"Govan," she replies. 

What did the Siamese twins from Glasgow call their autobiography? Oor Wullie. 

A guy walks into an antiques shop and says: "How much for the set of antlers?"
"Two hundred quid," says the bloke behind the counter.
"That's affa deer," says the guy. 

Did you hear about the fella who liked eating bricks and cement? He's awa' noo. 

After announcing he's getting married, a boy tells his pal he'll be wearing the kilt. "And what's the tartan?" asks his mate. "Oh, she'll be wearing a white dress," he replies. 

What do you call a pigeon that goes to Aviemore for its holidays? A skean dhu. 

How many Spanish guys does it take to change a lightbulb? Just Juan. 

A man takes a pair of shoes back to the shop and complains that there is a lace missing.
"No," argues the assistant, "look at the label - it says Taiwan ." 

What's the difference between The Rolling Stones and an Aberdeen sheep farmer? The Rolling Stones say: "Hey you, get off of my cloud." And an Aberdeen sheep farmer says: "Hey McLeod, get off of ma ewe." 

What do you call an illegitimate Scottish insect? A wee fly b*d. 

What about the Scotsman who lost his testicles in a motorcycle accident? The surgeon re-attached them with Bostik. 

While being interviewed for a job as a bus driver, a guy is asked: "What would you do if you had a rowdy passenger?"
"I'd put him off at the next stop," he says.
"Good. And what would you do if you couldn't get the fare?"
"I'd take the first two weeks in August," he replies. 

Two negatives make a positive but only in Scotland do two positives make a negative - "Aye right." 

A Glasgow man - steaming and skint - is walking down Argyle Street when he spots a guy tinkering with the engine of his car. "What's up, Jimmy?" he asks. "Piston broke," he replies. "Aye, same as masel..."

Many thanks to http://joebangles.blog.co.uk/ 

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.

Just had a laugh reading about a poor passenger on a French train that had to be rescued by firemen after having his arm sucked down one of the on-board toilets whilst trying to fish out his mobile phone (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7693386.stm). Apparently the passenger was carried away by emergency services, with the toilet still attached to his arm...

It reminded me of being on a flight from Edinburgh to London a few months ago that got held up on the tarmac for a couple hours while mechanics tried to retrieve a mobile phone that had been dropped down the toilet. Why did they have to get it back? Because they had to be sure it was switched off as it was against regulations to fly with mobiles switched on. Life was so much easier (and safer) before the bloody things were invented!

In a world of persistent change it's great to be able to put down roots or at least feel that there are certain things that you can depend upon. Yesterday saw the latest, and if word on the street rings true, possibly the final release from proven pioneers of blues based rock, AC/DC. From all my years of listening to rock music, probably pushing 30 now (I was an early starter) AC/DC are one of those bands that have continually hit the nail on the head each time. While my rock musical tastes have diversified and expanded to allow space for more modern takes on the genre I've never forgotten those roots.

I remember as a 9 year old boy pleading with my mum to let me buy the new AC/DC album, 'Highway to Hell', whilst we weren't a religious family my dear mum had her reservations about the impact that a record with so many connotations in it's title and a man on the front with devil horns might have on an impressionable young boy. However, rationality and possibly some tears and snotters won through and I was soon the proud owner of said vinyl which is still one of my prized pieces in a collection that's pushing 500 plus, that's just the vinyl by the way, my cd collection is possibly double that.

Thankfully today there will be no emotional blackmail needed as I take myself off to the shops to purchase the rock legends latest release 'Black Ice' and there will be just as much excitement as I take it home to listen to it as there was nearly 30 years ago. I know exactly what I'm going to get, there will be no surpises, AC/DC have never really pushed the boundaries but what they do, they do so well and it's that dependable and persistent quality that makes them the best. For those of you reading this that think they can sniff the obvious analogy here, no such luck, I'd never be so crass, besides Mimtech continually push the boundaries of what we can do!

As in my blog two back I'm not going to enter into another political minefield, this time the one that is Sarah Palin, and to be honest I'm not the greatest fan of American humour but hats off to Tina Fey. Her sketches of the Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live are very, very funny. My favourite line is, "...I can see Russia from my house." Actually, they're so realistic they're scary (or is that Sarah Palin? - for something truly scary try watching Palin's interview with Katie Couric of CBS News). No doubting which one between Tina Fey and Sarah Palin is the intellectual and if you are in any doubt then I sincerely hope you're not an American of voting age.

By the way, I haven't seen such a good political impersonation since the chimps at http://www.bushorchimp.com/.

We've always played on the fact the we are vendor agnostic and independent from the WCM companies we partner with. Sometimes it's not an easy space to occupy with some vendors being less than comfortable with the arrangement due to numerous perceived 'conflicts of interest' - mostly brought about by their paranoia and blind faith in their 'best of breed' product.

For us, becoming agnostic simply made good sound commercial sense. Afterall, when we started trading almost three years ago we were a 100% Obtree C4 house and what with its end of life in sight (there, someone finally said what everyone knows!) if we hadn't adapted, our own end of life would be fast approaching too.

Now we're actively supporting clients with WCM solutions and developments in Immediacy, Sitecore, EpiServer, Pepperio as well as RedDot and good old soon to be departed (oops, said it again) Livelink WCMPS/Obtree C4. 

Simon has blogged many times about our WCM to WCM Migration offering, MIM:Switch. It's very exciting for us that the MIM:Switch toolset is now being used in anger for the first time at a major UK organisation to assist in their move away from Livelink WCMPS/Obtree C4. Which solution are they moving to? They/we don't know yet but that's not important... we're vendor agnostic!