Plan your Automated Content Migration to Sitecore

Content migration calls for careful planning and a structured process – this includes jotting the list of parameters that must be covered to accomplish a loss less migration. Automated migration should be chosen only in cases where the content to be migrated is huge and structured, else the basic reason why we chose automated content migration is violated and to top all that, the migration process becomes more time consuming and increases the cost.

Sitecore Migration Process

First, we need to know the source and have a defined data model of the source content to have a clear target.

Decide upon how to access the content in source and find out if APIs or direct access is available. Try and understand how the source maps and organizes the internal links. About the media assets, look out if they have an accessible repository for these elements? This will be handy over the process.

It is important to document all that you can learn about the source to add it in the plan. This will be required later during mapping. Produce a content inventory which identifies all pages to be migrated and categorize them based on templates so that they can be uniquely identified.

Next step in this process, is defining a Target for all the source files to go. Now, gather information about the target, i.e. the location where the source contents will be moved to. Define all the Sitecore data templates and fields and also the information architecture to be used in Sitecore. The ultimate design of Sitecore implementation needs to be in place prior to mapping source and target and writing the scripts.

The final step is to map the source and target to connect them. Start by defining what needs to be placed where, using the scripts. Once mapped, proceed with either creating a script of your own or by configuring the existing migration tools, though the latter is not applicable in most complex migration scenarios. Check the Experience editor mode in Sitecore to know if any other migrations can be easily made.

With all this in place, you should be ready to migrate the contents to Sitecore. If you are in need of assistance to migrate your content to Sitecore, contact us. Our Sitecore experts can help you out with the migration to reduce your time and efforts involved.