Streamlined content migration to the Episerver Digital Experience Platform

Episerver Expert Services has created a streamlined content migration service designed to be the easiest and most cost-effective way to migrate your existing CMS content into the Episerver Digital Experience Platform. This service will help streamline your project and allow your team to start taking advantage of the benefits and capabilities offered by Digital Experience Platform quickly and efficiently.

Process

Analysis of source solution

Analysis of your existing CMS solution, for the types of content assets, the data contained within the content, the relationships between the content assets, the structure of the sites, and management objects.

Domain mapping of source Solution

Expert Services constructs a domain model of your web site in a fully descriptive modeling language, including all assets of your source CMS, utilizing the available libraries from the Expert Services migration tool.

NOTE: This is not a scripting process. The processing that would normally be in migration scripts has already been developed as part of the Episerver content migration tool. This is simply a descriptor of your existing solution, in a language that the migration tools will read to map from the source to the target.

Optional: Create service endpoint for source CMS

If required, Expert Services will create a service endpoint to access the content from your existing source CMS. For most industry CMS this step is not necessary as there is a standard service endpoint for directly accessing the content assets independent of the coded solution available.

Target CMS preparation

Set up of target Episerver Digital Experience Platform CMS, with tailoring of content classes to represent the domain model of your source site in the most effective way to take advantage of all the Episerver CMS capabilities.

Execute and validate migration

Episerver Expert Services runs the migration process supervising the detailed output, and validating the outcome. If necessary, running the migration multiple times, augmenting the content type definitions, until the completion of a fully valid migration.

NOTE: Migrations can be performed incrementally and will automatically recover from a stalled execution, should the source system become unavailable temporarily during the process.

Deliver migrated site

Delivery of the migrated site can be as a package made available to the client or partner, or in the case of Digital Experience Platform, the option exists to deploy directly to your integration environment.

What gets migrated?

Content assets

All content assets, whether they are text or digital media, pages or content blocks, structured or unstructured, are migrated into the Episerver CMS where you will be able to enjoy the powerful and intuitive authoring and site management experience.

Metadata and properties

The meta-data and properties of all your content will be mapped and migrated to the content assets of the Episerver CMS.

Containers and structures

Core content structures to support information architecture, menus, taxonomy, and simple organization of content will be migrated into similar or equivalent structures in the Episerver CMS, maintaining the relationships that each container node has with each content asset.

Users and access control

Users, user-groups, membership, and permissions will be persisted through the migration process to represent the same permissions using the Episerver CMS Groups and Permissions system.

How does it work?

Rather than just a migration, the solution Episerver Expert Services delivers could almost be described as synchronization between two distinct environments, with a transformation process utilized as necessary to map between disparate types and structures.

The Expert Services team has leveraged its deep experience in research and development in the content management space to create a universal content type descriptor. This language is used in the migration process to store the content objects in an intermediate model.

Typical content migration solutions script from the source content model to the target content model using a complicated set of rules and exceptions. The process is then run as a batch process, needing to complete from beginning to end in order for a valid run to complete. The complexity of the solution is linear to the amount of details in both the source and the target solution.

The Episerver Expert Services migration tool navigates the entire source solution, determining what will be migrated next, by examining the relationships between each content asset being migrated. The process can begin anywhere, and if it is interrupted, resume anywhere. Complexity is greatly reduced because many of the transformations have been converted into reusable functions, which are composed together when the source domain is modeled.

Will I need to have a content freeze?

The Episerver Expert Services content migration service does not run in a batch process. While it can take some time to process and load the complete source solution on the first time, the tools track which assets have been migrated and which have not. This means if part of the source solution is migrated at one period of time, the rest can be migrated at a later period. It also can be configured in most cases to track and be aware of modifications that were made to assets which have already been migrated, and re-sync them to the target environment with the new updates. With these capabilities, content-freezes are often not necessary at all or can be reduced to very small windows of time.