Migrating to Drupal: Who? What? Why? and How?

Click to watch "Migrating to Drupal. Who? What? Why? and How?"

Two industry veterans, one a project manager and one a development manager, will show you through how to plan your successful move onto Drupal.

In the old days, moving to Drupal often meant converting static pages or templates to Drupal nodes. Today, it is rare that we get to build a site from scratch. The reality is that most major Drupal projects are now migrations from other content management systems. Taking on such a migration is not a trivial decision for an organization. There is a great deal of complexity in the reasons for migrating, but the process is often not understood well amongst the various stakeholders.

We'll take an end-to-end look at the challenges of migrating external data into Drupal. This will be a non-technical session, with special value for people new to Drupal (or to Drupal migrations). We will cover the following topics in-depth:

  • How to manage the process (and the people) involved in this critical task.
  • How to get the developers and business people to agree to project scope.
  • Identifying the known and unknown technical challenges in a Drupal migration.
  • Resources and tools for migrating data.
  • How to mitigate the risk involved in content migration.

Nicole Lind is Group Vice President at Phase2 Technologies. She has managed some of the largest Drupal migration projects like the original LifetimeTV, Fastcompany.com and Department of Energy.

Ken Rickard is Director of Development and Professional Services at Palantir.net. He has written migrations from external systems into Drupal on each release since Drupal 4.6, including Foreign Affairs magazine archives from 1947 to present.

Track: 
Business and Strategy
Experience level: 
Beginner
Time slot: 
Wednesday 10:45-11:45
Room: 
Atlanta

Comments

I have 3 questions I was thinking about after the proesentation:

Have you any experience using screen scraping techniques and tools?

When would that be a doable approach?

What is your experience - pro and cons?