Purpose

When migrating an existing Web site to EPiServer, there are often several questions regarding existing content that need to be answered. There are several different approaches to take when migrating to EPiServer. This document describes two of them.

Introduction

When migrating an existing Web site to EPiServer, there are often some questions regarding existing content that need to be answered. There are several different approaches to take when migrating to EPiServer. This document describes two of them.

How is the content stored on the current Web site?

Approximately how many pages are there on the Web site?

Would the customers want to make changes to structure of the current Web site?

Will there be significant changes of the design on the Web site?

Could the old Web site be kept and phased out at a later time?

What is the quality of the content?

Which functionality needs to be migrated?

The correct method of migration can be chosen based on the answer to these questions. It is very common when a new Web is developed that the webmaster wants to remove inaccurate content, make significant changes to the structure of the Web site and improve the overall design. If that is the case, or if the current Web site is based on static HTML pages, the simple solution is probably cut and paste.

An often overlooked solution is to actually hire resources in the Web project that will be responsible for content migration.

No matter how structured the content is, there is always a need to clean the imported data. Another issue which needs to be taken care of is user rights, which should be implemented after migration.

If the content of the current Web site is stored in XML files, very structured HTML files or in tables in a database and there is a large amount of pages, a very attractive solution is to build a simple migration tool.

Figure 1. Migration tool

Develop a simple Windows application that connects to the current Web site by using the recommended interface, e.g. http, Web services and database calls. You will then extract the actual content and structure from the existing Web site.

The Windows application needs to insert the content in EPiServer and maintain the structure. This can be achieved in several ways; the recommended and easiest way is to use the built-in Web service. If you do it this way, you can be sure that the content is published correctly by using the correct stored procedures in the database and updating the database tables in the correct way.

Sometimes it is a good idea to integrate the existing Web site with EPiServer and develop functionality in the form of user controls, which extract information from the original system and display it in EPiServer. This approach is widely used when you want to migrate existing applications into the new EPiServer-based Web.

Figure 2. Integrating with EPiServer

An easy way of making this solution is to build a user control that simply shows the content from the CMS system in the EPiServer site. This could also be done by using standard hyperlinks or Iframes, which will result in a very quick integration at the GUI level.