ASR: Flexibility and quality improvement in migration to SharePoint

In 2011, the ASR insurance corporation initiated a companywide project to make the move to the SharePoint platform with both their ECM and WCM systems. For the business the new platform held a promise for better integration, easier collaboration, and of course a chance to update the look and feel of the public websites.

Reusing content in SharePoint

One of the requirements of the business was to keep the content-reuse model as implemented in their current Tridion environment intact in the new SharePoint environment. This posed a serious challenge for IT as SharePoint has no out-of-the-box solution for this type of content reuse.

Realistic migration strategy

For the implementation of the content reuse functionality, experts were hired and internal programmers were trained. For the automated content migration part IT recognized that the challenge was beyond their own skillset, and thus they asked us to advice on a realistic migration strategy that would be repeatable for each of its websites.

Inventory of current environment

The migration advice started with a full inventory of ASR’s Tridion environment to identify content types, structure, metadata quality, level of content reuse, etc. The results of this inventory were used as input for the functional design and migration plan.

The plan’s key points

The advice in the migration plan evolved around a number of key points:

• Implement a classic Extract, Transform, Load migration street with clear distinction between the stages for maximum control.
• Allow for input from business (such as: rules for metadata enrichment and restructuring) in the transformation phase.
• Make the migration street generic enough to be reusable for all website migrations at the client.
• Fit in with the existing corporate DTAP (Development, Test, Acceptance, Production) rollout strategy.
• Minimize impact for business as usual.

Flexibility, focus on quality improvement

The resulting migration street was applauded to by both IT and business.

• From the IT perspective, the migration was extremely flexible, significantly lowering the impact of functional changes, which fit very well with the SCRUM development methodology used by I.
• From the business perspective, the automated migration meant that some input was still required, but business could focus fully on quality improvement: improve metadata, rewrite passages, tinker with the structure and layout, etc.

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