Last week, we discussed the first two critical steps of migration in another blog. You can read it here. Now that you have let those two steps sink in a little, this piece will make a little more sense. After you have spent the time to do your early pre-migration planning, and have vetted out solutions and tools for your migration, you can move on to planning the migration itself. These next two steps are also critical to ensuring a successful migration. Let’s dive right in.
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Migration Planning
Now that you’ve properly chosen a migration solution, you should take some time to do a little more planning for the migration. First, you want to plan for usability changes. When you migrate from one ECM to another, you will likely gain some functionality and lose some functionality. Take a look at what you might gain and lose and determine what features will be carried over. If you lose something that is vital to user experience, you may want to identify ways to compensate for that loss. You also want to be careful that you aren’t replicating the source system experience. In this step, you also want to identify and resolve data incompatibilities, as well as identifying assets and reusable tools. And last, it is time to map compatible data. Mapping is arguably just as important as the migration itself.
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Testing
Before you dive right into the migration, you should take some time to do some testing. Despite all the planning, it is inevitable that errors, irregularities, and unforeseen conditions will arise. Take some time to schedule some iterative testing. This will hopefully help whittle down the pool of unmigratable data and help you determine a realistic and acceptable error rate. You are also going to want to leverage your testing configuration as a way to offer a predictive view into the live migration. All of the configuration and set-up should be capable of being reused for the live migration thus eliminating the need to do a whole new configuration. Last, you want to ensure proper time for testing. Many see testing as non-essential and a time waster. Testing is neither of those things. It is the last opportunity to catch any unforeseen circumstances in your migration plan. Our advice is to not rush through this last step and allocate enough time to test and fix anything that may be in need of fixing.
The combination of these two blogs is basically a condensed version of our Master of Migration Best Practices Whitepaper. If you want more information and a breakdown of each step and sub-step, download it here. For additional information contact our migration experts at info@seeunity.com.
