At 08:37 8/11/2002, Beach, Sandra wrote:
We are currently migrating to MCMS 2001 from a manual site and we have several subsites of 10,000+ pages. The site owners are going crazy doing the data migration manually and I was wondering if anyone could recommend an automated tool we could use or modify for our use? Preferably free or low cost would be most useful. Like everyone else we have $2.50 and a ball of string (aka $0) for implementation.
Hi Sandra,
The bad news is that an automated conversion will give you little more than "garbage in, garbage out". The good news is that you have an unique opportunity to cleanup and restructure your sites. Most large, manually managed sites suffer from some or all of the following problems: * High percentage of out-of-date, innacurate or irrelevant information * Inconsistent overall site structure * Many usability problems * Structured along organisational lines instead of tasks It is my experience that a thorough review will identify that at least half of the pages can be thrown away in a conversion, saving a lot of time. At the end of the day, the end users will benefit more from a better, more consistent *site*, instead of just a better CMS. I've written more about this with regards to intranets (although it applies equally well to websites): * Sixteen steps to a renewed corporate intranet http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_renewintranet/index.html Hope this helps, James ------------------------- James Robertson Step Two Designs Pty Ltd Knowledge Management Consultancy, SGML & XML Content Management Requirements Toolkit 112 CMS requirements, ready to cut-and-paste http://www.steptwo.com.au/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
