Alina Luchian, Communications and Marketing ManagerMany managers approach intranet migration with the feeling that all they need to do is move all their content onto the new system and everything will work seamlessly. Obviously, most of the time this is not the case. Not only can this approach lead to user experience problems, but it also denies you the opportunity to manage and refine your content database.
Take the time to read about the following three mistakes that most people make when migrating data to their intranet so you can avoid them in your organization.
1. Omitting a content audit beforehand
The mistake of thinking that all content on their current system is equally valuable is the most common amongst companies migrating to an intranet. This leads them to the conclusion that they should migrate all their content over onto the new system. However, as we found out during our 14 years of experience, migrating all your content is very inefficient.
A better approach is to perform a content audit to find out what content you have on your current system, and out of that what you really need.
Your content audit should answer the following questions:
- How much content do you have?
- How old is your content?
- What’s the metadata of your content?
- How valuable is your content?
We provide help with any migration project from an existing solution to XWiki, by taking over your existing data. As part of our data recovery projects, we implement the following methodology, meant to smooth the transition for you:
2. Forgetting to install the structure to the new intranet
Most organizations upgrade to a new intranet because they want to reap the benefits of a new or better platform. However, moving to a new platform can throw up some unexpected problems in the way your intranet works. A well structured intranet identifies important differences between the old and new platforms, so you can predict problems that might occur after migration and address them now.
This strategy should let you know which data you need to migrate, what you should archive, and what you can delete. All companies should have a content governance strategy in place anyway, but if you don’t currently have one, an intranet migration is a good opportunity to develop one.
For example, your content might end up being stored in surprising places on your new intranet, which could make it difficult for your users to access it as part of their daily activities. Use your governance and structure solutions to predict issues like this and address them before they become a problem for your users.
3. Doing the migration by themselves
To capitalize on all the information and knowledge of your business, it is important that the new solution is able to handle this transition. This is why we offer to assist you with the process. To avoid losing data and to save time, we have developed this import to be fully automated and secure.
These are the top benefits of performing a data import process with XWiki:
- Each document becomes a webpage;
- Documents are accessible from any web browser;
- Edit and View interfaces on the same page (no back office);
- Decrease or disappearance of information silos;
- Addition of various features to collaborate around the content: comments and annotations;
- Our technology allows you to perform massive imports of documents in your wiki, reducing the risk of losing data to almost none.
Want to know more? Drop us a line at sales@xwiki.com or try our solution, for free, to convince yourself. No strings attached.
