3 Tips for a Successful Ektron to Drupal Conversion

2. 2 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Introduction – Since January 2015 when Ektron and Episerver were combined into a single company and CMS platform, many organizations have been making the choice to move their website to a different platform – Drupal has been a natural fit given its extensive feature set, flexibility, and open source community

3. 3 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Introduction Content strategy is an important part of an website migration: – What content will be rewritten? – What content will be reorganized? – What content will be migrated?

5. 5 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary What is content migration? – Always a major part of any website conversion or migration – Can require multiple approaches depending on the complexity of your needs – Structured and unstructured content require different approaches – As-is migration – Examples: Press releases, existing documents

6. 6 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Methods of content migration 1. Manual migration – Simplest technically speaking, but can be the most time-consuming 2. Exporting an XLIFF (XML) file 3. A custom ETL process – Most complex of the three, requiring custom coding

8. 8 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Manual Content Migration – Easiest method, but most time-consuming – Difficulty ranges depending on the amount of: – Existing HTML/CSS styles – Requirement to restyle new content (vs. having more structured data fields) – Can range from 4-8 pages/hour to more for more complicated content

9. 9 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Manual Content Migration – Stay organized: – Track all existing URLs in a spreadsheet to use as a “map” – For new content: – Create “content outlines” that allow you to create fields for each type of structured data – Think of it as a map of your content types in a Word doc that’s easy for content writers to use

10. 10 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Manual Content Migration – Make sure Drupal is set up correctly: – Match Drupal to your content outlines – Clearly define what types of content will receive which styles if manual styling (H1 tags, etc.) is required – Try to limit manual migration where possible

12. 12 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary XLIFF File Migration – XLIFF – Ektron’s localization feature to get the content we need. – XLIFF: XML Localisation Interchange File Format) – Files are available through the language export feature, Available even if the site is in a single language

13. 13 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary XLIFF File Migration – XLIFF files include all content, menus and taxonomy. – The trick is understanding the files and what to do with them. – While it doesn’t include everything, it does include: – Published status – Page URL – Meta Information – Page Title – Page Text Content

14. 14 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary XLIFF File Migration – For several reasons, the format will not tell you where the page exists in the site structure – We recommended exporting in logical groups. – Think in terms of creating sets of XLIFF files that are of the same content type, or in the same section. – We will call these “migration sets.”

15. 15 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary XLIFF File Migration – Before we explore the concept of migration sets a little bit further, let’s take a look at some of the <body> information of an XLIFF file:

16. 16 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary XLIFF File Migration – Similar to the previous code snippet, you can see a properly XML-formatted document that, in this case shows the meta information.

21. 21 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Custom Automated ETL Migration – The third method of content migration is the most complex of the three – Offers a single, comprehensive solution that matches all needs – The customer automated approach uses technology to conduct an ETL process: – Extract – Transform – Load

22. 22 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Custom Automated ETL Migration – How Does It Work? – Scripts extract content from the source database – Moves content to the Transform database – Once in the Transform database, content is: – Scrubbed, or parsed, to remove things like inline styles or broken HTML – Styles are applied as appropriate – Crosslinks are updated

23. 23 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Custom Automated ETL Migration – The role of Data Mapping – Because content lives in different locations from the old site to the new, we must map content locations from the old to the new – Content is mapped, along with assets (files, media, etc) – Source and Destination URLs are generated and mapped – Taxonomies, Menus and other Related Content is mapped – Load into the Destination Site Database – Use the Drupal API to automate the loading of the transformed content – Assigns content through modules as needed

24. 24 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Custom Automated ETL Migration – Exception Handling – It often takes multiple runs of the content migration scripts to complete the entire process – Why? Most source content isn’t consistent – As successive runs of the migration scripts are conducted, content that doesn’t follow normal rules is identified – Migration scripts are updated to accommodate variations in source content – We term this approach the “Multiple Pass Method”

25. 25 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Custom Automated ETL Migration – Benefits of the Multiple Pass Method – Once the scripts have been developed, and exceptions handled, the same script can be run over and over – Baseline migration moves 100% of all content – Delta migration(s) move the 10% - 25% of content that changes during testing, training and related activities prior to launch – Using this approach, we can avoid lengthy content freezes – No need to force authors to stop editing content since we can simply run the same scripts to migrate updated content – This is especially important when considering specialized content, like user-generated or social content

27. 27 ©2017 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Recap – Almost any content migration will require more than a single method – Each method has its own benefits and cases where it works best – Planning ahead will save time and missteps – Document the steps required and make sure to prepare plenty of specific direction that may be required for manual formatting of content