In episode 94 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and David Turner of DCL take a look at content migration and discuss all of the players and parts involved.

“It’s not just about moving the content and loading it to the new system. You actually have to transform the content from the unstructured formats.”

–David Turner, DCL

Related links: 

* Data Conversion Laboratory

* Content strategy pitfalls podcast: migration

Twitter handles: 

* @billswallow

* @dclaboratory

Transcript:

Bill Swallow:              Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we discuss content migration. Hi, everyone. I’m Bill Swallow, and today I have a special guest, David Turner of Data Conversion Laboratories, also known as DCL. DCL is an industry leader in data and content transformation services and solutions. Hey, David.

David Turner:                   Hi, Bill. Thanks so much for including me today.

BS:                   Oh, thank you for joining. And today, we’re going to take a look at content migration and talk about the players and parts involved.

DT:                   Yeah.

BS:                   I think to kick it off, what is meant by content migration?

DT:                   Well, that’s a good question. It’s actually a broad term. But in general, you’re just talking about moving content in whatever formats to some kind of a new repository. In the work that we do at DCL, that typically means somebody’s implementing a component content management system, or maybe moving from one CCMS to another, or a lot of times we work in scholarly publishing where they’re changing website hosting platforms. All that to say, it’s not always the most popular conversation. I think I heard one technology provider recently say, “Migrations are death.” But they are an important conversation, and those are the kinds of content migrations we typically work on.

BS:                   Alright. Why might you need to migrate content then?

DT:                   Well, depending on your use case, you actually might not have to do a lot of content migration. Some platform vendors will encourage you just to start from scratch, or you might even be able to write a script to just lift and load content. If you’ve got really well-formed content, it can just work. But I think in most cases, you typically need to be thinking about the migration strategy, specifically if you’re moving from, say an unstructured content management workflow to this SCM, or structured content management space, like we’ve seen at TechDocs, or we’re starting to see a lot more in Life Sciences, educational publishing. In these instances, it’s not just about moving the content and loading it to the new system, but you actually have to transform the content from the unstructured formats, like Word or InDesign, into component-based formats, like DITA or other flavors of XML. And, ultimately, you have to do that in a way that minimizes manual cleanup.

DT:                   Now, on the scholarly publishing side, it’s a little different. You’re typically not necessarily moving to a new kind of XML. You might be taking decades of content and just updating those content models. So really for them, they’re looking to try to clean things up, get rid of some warts, make sure that links are working, things like that.