North West Regional Technical Forum - Migration

Challenge

The existing team was tasked the migration of a legacy ASP 3.0 platform that was over 16 years old. The current platform was hard to maintain and didn't provide a presence with a more contemporary responsive design. The requirements stipulated that over 5 gig or 3400 files needed to be uploaded into a box.net account (a SASS document share platform) while maintaining association to existing content and navigation structure.

Solution

The client's content and data was mixed between static html pages, csv exports and a MS Sql Server Database. Because the target system was Drupal 7 I decided to leverage the migrate module as the foundation. Extended classes were created for each content type and preprocessing and collection efforts were employed prior to migration.

Results

70% of the content was migrated while the remainder required manual migration and cleanup.

Robert’s Thoughts

The constraints for this project were difficult to comply with. The data itself was inconsistent and coordinating the data for a consistent structured navigation and relationships between content was very time consuming. In many cases the data didn't match the static HTML output, the original system was designed as a publishing model. Where by users would enter data (it appears manually into the database tables) and a script would generate static HTML pages for placement on the web server. From my audit of the system it would appear that this strategy changed over the last 5-8 years and some of the pages were dynamically generated using ASP 3.0.

Likewise the media migration was difficult to address because the chosen vendor did not provide up to date libraries nor integration into the service API. We spent quite a few weeks trouble shooting integration and reliably connecting/sending media via the migration module within Drupal. Unfortunately we ran out of time in the budget and delivery date to finalize the media migration.