The end is in sight
Remember that migration plan from phase 2? Having decided to publish back-issues of news stories to the start of 2009, I could quantify how much content we would need to migrate. I managed to cut the original content from 6416 entries down to 3000 entries. Some of this was by losing older news stories. The remainder I did by reorganising content into simplified chunks. Where a section had dozens of one-paragraph pages, I grouped and combined them into fewer pages. I removed out of date content. Cut out duplicated content. Barred the *what’s this doing on the intranet?* content.
So it was at this point in the project, around September 2009, that we agreed on an unofficial launch date of 1st January 2010. We reckoned we could populate the new intranet in that time. We would divert all our attention to the migration and bat off any new development work.
Migration checklist
We pulled a few extra resources from the web team to help out with migration. We had hands-on training for the CMS publishing and strict rules on page titles, metadata and file names.
I shared the master migration plan with the team through Google Docs which worked wonders for collaborating on our progress, showing up to the minute changes and no document check-out and check-in. Meh!
Content freeze
We announced a moratorium on intranet updates with the exception of corporate news and features and urgent ministerial and board messages.
Curious to note that having announced a content freeze, intranet content owners who had not done anything with their content for months and months suddenly wanted to update their pages. Don’t you love human nature?
Dual publishing
Because we had agreed to continue to publish news stories, I divided the migration work amongst the team with one person responsible for publishing ongoing news onto the existing intranet and also entering into the CMS for the new intranet. We had a few people working on news story back-issues. And a few working from the existing Dreamweaver content, manually building the green, blue and purple sections of the site.
Migration production line
Cut and paste. Cut and paste. Robot-like for weeks. The migration team laboured on. The traffic lights on our Google Docs spreadsheet slowly changed from red to green. We took this chance to do a little editorial work on pages as we moved them across, rewriting in plain English and reformatting pages to improve readability. I was also keeping an eye on our Google Search Appliance as it indexed the migrated content. Up and up went the page count. Perfect page titles all round!
A URL was leaked at some point and from studying Google Analytics I could see that there were about 60 people around the organisation looking at the new site before it was officially launched. I’m glad they were that interested!
Communications and launch
In my next post I’ll cover how we worked with our internal communications colleagues to prepare staff for the new intranet and how we have evaluated and evolved the intranet since launch.
In this series
- Research, surveys and brief
- Information architecture and content audit
- Wireframe designs and user testing
- Visual design, HTML and CMS build
- Migration, content freeze/dual publishing
- Communications, launch and evaluation