Go to page: 1 2   

Printer Friendly Version

Have you ever moved into a new home completely free of incident? Unfortunately, few of us are lucky enough to have experienced a successful and uneventful move where everything goes according to plan, where movers are on time, where no furniture is nicked by a careless drop, where fresh paint in your new residence isn’t marred by the corner of a desk, and where you’re not subjected to the movers’ dreaded posterior cleavage.

Most moving experiences are calculated in degrees of frustration and measures of severity. Migration of a large-scale, enterprise-wide intranet is no different. Unlike building a new system from scratch, migrations force you to work within the confines of your preexisting intranet components. And you have to do it without causing too big a disruption on the user community and without breaking the system.

A lot of things can go wrong during an intranet migration, but preparation and foresight can help you avoid some of the most common intranet migration pitfalls:

Team members are unprepared or bump into each other

Many technology-based systems fall under the care of IT and require little involvement on the part of the user community beyond saving all their work prior to the scheduled migration period. Intranet migration, on the other hand, involves the careful coordination of technical personnel, the content owners and managers from each intranet section, and to a lesser extent, end users who contribute content (if your intranet allows for user-generated content).

Every person involved with the migration has his or her role to play in order to pull off a large-scale migration. Without careful coordination among the various intranet section leaders and technical staff, team members can end up bumping into each other during the migration process or even undoing what someone else has done.

When preparing for migration of your own intranet section, it’s all too tempting to put blinders on and adopt an attitude of “I’ve got my own worries, let everyone else do what they have to do.” But this attitude is counterproductive. What others do before and during a large-scale intranet migration can affect what you do.

Remedy: Draft a migration game plan, listing what will be moved, where each component will be moved, who’s responsible for moving which component, when these components will be moved, and how long each process is going to take. You don’t need to know all the minute details of what everyone is doing, but you should at least have a big picture view of the whole operation. Also, if it’s a complex migration, you can run some war games, a dry run of the game plan prior to the real migration.

You’re racing against the system downtime clock

Large organizations will most likely have mirrored servers or separate development and production environments, and dedicated database or content servers. This will minimize or eliminate system downtime. The advantage here is that the intranet migration can be performed during the working day with little-to-no system interruption. Users don’t even have to know that anything is happening.

Go to page: 1 2   

Printer Friendly Version