Start flossing your content now

Added By Tony Byrne at 22-Jul-2008 | Twitter: @TonyByrne |

Nobody likes content migrations. But they're inevitable. Like trips to the dentist.

You can perhaps reduce your pain by reading this nifty little white paper, "Content migration: options and strategies," by James Robertson of StepTwo Designs. It's a wonderfully concise survey of your likely toothaches and options for dealing with them.

James is not optimistic about outsourcing the migration project, but as others have pointed out, staffing depends on how you organize the effort, and there is potentially a role for temporary help.

You'll also want to pay close attention to the question of metadata. Oftentimes enterprises implement a new system in order to employ tag intelligence for publishing and navigation. Someone knowledgeable needs to add all those tags -- at least as part of the final migration QA process. Like transforming the content itself, you'll find automated classification tools a mixed bag at best.

Everyone can agree though, that the more attention you pay to regularly cleaning up your content beforehand, the more likely this particular dentist visit will prove less painful.

Categories: Tony Byrne, Enterprise Portals, Web Content Management, Implementation, XML