Can we automate migrating to SDL Tridion?

Question

We are done migrating a website from old CMS to SDL Tridion. We have thousands of clients out of which fewer than five are migrated. Now let's say we need to automate migrating the rest of the thousands clients, obviously we can not use manual effort. Is there a way to develop automated solution against SDL using any APIs it may provide? If yes where can we find documentation for APIs? Any Books or online tutorials for the same?

Answer 1

all very technical answers. Whatever route you choose you need to weigh up the option of not doing a technical migration (and trying to get that right) versus employing a load of students to copy and paste.

Answer 2

Regardless of the CMS, the complexity of a migration can be measured based on how organized is your content in the system you want to migrate from.

I categorize the migration into 3 types related to the Origin and Destination:

• 1--> CMS to CMS
• 2--> Database to CMS
• 3--> WebSite to CMS

If the original source is a database or another CMS typically the complexity is reduced, as the content is already structured. You have to extract that and map the existing content with the structure that will have in the new system

If the goal is migrate an existing website into a CMS the complexity increases as the content is more disorganized that having that in the CMS. Again, if the content in the site is properly structured is still possible to automate that, but most of the cases are old sites maintained manually. There are commercial tools that crawl the content from the sites and apply patterns to identify common elements, common content, common metadata, structure and are able to massage the original content and apply logic based on rules that allows to structure the content, however even the best tool has a hard work to do when the source is disorganized. Also I have seen migrations that cut the final html in pieces and put that in the CMS. That is an easy approach but of course a wrong one, as you are not taking any advantage of the CMS

And 3 Types related the source type we migrate from and the source type we want to obtain

• 1--> Content to Content
• 2--> (HTML + Content All together) into (HTML) + (Content) separated
• 3--> (HTML + Content + Code All together) into (HTML) + (Content) + (Code) separated

Content to Content Migration is less complex

Second option is of course more complex, as you have to Separate Content and HTML that will become templates

Third option is even more complex, as if you are extracting the html of the page (using an http client for instance as most of the commercial tools do), you are not capturing the logic of the page. For this case you need to work at the file level

Try to do a very depth analysis before you enter in a migration, as things can turn complex. Only if you have a very good knowledge of the original system and solid patterns to apply you can think in an automation

Answer 3

Tridion has extensive APIs and these are thoroughly documented. Your starting point for SDL Tridion 2011 is https://www.sdltridionworld.com/downloads/documentation/SDLTridion2011SP1/index.aspx

Automated migrations are perfectly possible, however API support is not the limiting factor here. Understanding your data in your source and target scenarios is much more important.