Content Migration is hard work.  Dealing with thousands of HTML pages can be costly, time-consuming, and painful.  At the CM Pros and Gilbane Boston event last week, we enjoyed the focus on Content Migration.  One workshop in particular, Content Migration – the Dirty Little Secret of Content Management, provided a thorough and comprehensive investigation of  various approaches to succeed with enterprise content migration projects and to overcome the numerous hurdles and headaches associated with content migration.  For a summary of the workshop, check out Irina Guseva’s write-up at CMSWire.

One clear message from the workshop is that automation is clearly a winning strategy when it comes to complex migrations involving unstructured content and large volumes of HTML pages.

Key Benefits of Automated Content Migration:

1.    Save Time – Cut time to market up to 90% through automated data access, extraction, cleansing, transformation and QA.  Eliminate content freezes.  Accelerate your time to market for your production CMS.
2.    Save Money – Reduce manual, error-prone processes and cut resource requirements saving up to 80%.
3.    Accuracy -  Look for error detection and the ability to integrate complex JavaScript and AJAX content, as well as on-the-fly exception handling through real-time error identification.
4.    Project Completeness – Finish projects ahead of schedule, within budget, and no disruption to operations.

The alternative?  Manual cut-and-paste and black-box approaches which are complex, error-prone, expensive, and often times unable to complete the job.

There are a few vendors making bold promises around content migration.  We’ve stepped in and had to finish several of their projects because their tools and processes couldn’t get the whole project done and the client was losing their patience with the multiple delays and increasing costs.

Here are a few things to consider when choosing a Content Migration vendor and solution:

1.   Automation is King – Intel was able to reduce the number of developers on a large content migration project from 45 down to 2.  Check out how Intel reduced costs 80% and got their content migration with Kapow Technologies done in 1/10th the time.
2.    Don’t waste your time custom programming to a CMS’s APIs. Especially in cases where APIs don’t exits, visual UIs like Kapow’s provide full access to all functionality for proper loading of your content.
3.    Place your trust in “No Coding” through a robust Visual IDE which will save you peace of mind, frustration, headaches, and maybe even your job (just kidding).  Which is to say, avoid coding with JYTHON for transforming your data.
4.    Insist on Real-time Error Checking – don’t get caught in the ongoing process of checking your logs or QA’ing your site, only to find out it’s broken and then having to re-write your script and start again.

Kapow Technologies offers the industry’s ONLY solution to completely automate content migration.  Learn more on our website.  Here are three great resources to get you started:

1.    Whitepaper:  The Definitive Guide to Automating Content Migration
2.    Webinar:  A new approach to Content Migration – A use case featuring Intel
3.    Demo:  Extract data and load into CMS without APIs or coding

I recently participated in an intriguing discussion with Seth Grimes and Dana Gardner in a podcast on the Importance of Web Data Services for business Text Analytics solutions.

I want to highlight one important part of the discussion here:  the pitfall of using wrong data sources.

Text analytics is really a form of business intelligence where you analyze different data sources to draw conclusions and even make automated business actions based on the results.

Obviously, any conclusion drawn from BI or text analysis is no better than the quality of the data sources.  As they say, “junk in, junk out”, right?

There are four extremely important parameters to consider for optimizing data sources:

• The right data sources: Don’t settle for second-tier, sub-optimal data sources simply because they’re easily accessible or the only data currently available.
• A full picture of the data: It’s important to have data sources that provide a 360-degree view from the endless sources of data provided by internet users around the world, 24×7.
• Noise-free data: Eliminate irrelevant and extraneous data, while ensuring structure and context are accurate.  In addition to getting rid of advertisements, link tables, and duplicate content, you can specify parameters and filters such as dates and location to further eliminate noise that will impact your analysis
• Timeliness of data: Companies around the world rely on real-time stock quotes, banking transactions, and currency changes to manage their business and gain strategic advantages.  The world is rapidly changing around us and companies need to not only react to market changes quickly, but also need relevant, timely data to predict what will happen in the very near future.

How do you best address these four critical data source requirements?  Our approach is that if you can see the data in a web browser, you can access it.  You can now get 100% data coverage in near real-time for all the relevant data you need.

When you successfully address these four points in your text analysis, your critical business decisions will be more accurate, leading to competitive advantage, growth and profit.  What business would not want that?

I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast on Web Data Services for Text Analytics.  It includes great examples of how companies use Web Data Services to successfully power their business critical Text Analytics business solutions.

By:  Stefan Andreasen