Content Migration: What Can Be Automated and What Must Be Manual
Submitted by David Hobbs on 2 June 2010 - 4:47pm
Understandably, teams often focus on what tools can provide for migration. On the flip side, many teams are too knee-jerk about getting a legion of people to migrate content by hand. The decision of automation or not is probably a bit more subtle than immediately obvious (it's not an either/or, and there are degrees of involvement needed by people), but one that should be considered carefully. That said, let's assume you have a team and the tools to do a lot of automation in your migration. In order to make sure that you have a successful migration, make sure to consider the things that cannot be automated. Here's a quick table listing some items that could be automated and those that cannot:
| Migration Activity | Can By Automated? |
Note | |
|---|---|---|---|
| This is a revised HTML version of the table. | Click here for image of original table. | ||
| Turning into valid XHTML | Yes | Fairly trivial, but focus of some projects | |
| Moving into new DB schema | Yes | Focus of many Tool X to Tool Y discussions | |
| Placing content based on rules | Yes | ||
| Stripping out extraneous page info | Yes | ||
| Transforming to use new CSS | Yes | ||
| Scraping out structure from HTML | Yes | Systems Integrators often avoid | |
| Dealing with links between content | Yes | ||
| Track Progress | Yes | ||
| Automatic tagging | Yes | Depends on domain and training | |
| Training/designing/configuring tools | No | Automation isn't entirely free | |
| QAing automation | No | Probably not 100% but checking required | |
| Dealing with unusual cases | No | ||
| Defining new site vision | No | No unifying vision might mean loss of focus | |
| Editorial changes | No | A lot of content will require editorial work | |
| Internal communications | No | How communicate about changes? | |
| Product Management | No | When issues raised, what will be fixed? | |
| Training | No | How train people for new system? | |
| Defining team | No | ||
| Defining site behavior | No | Contant won't be moved into vacuum | |
| Content strategy | No | ||
| ROT cleanup | No | Analysis is aided by tools / decisions by ppl | |
| Site governance | No | ||
| Defining taxonomy, IA, etc | No | Directly affects automation efforts | |
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