Content Migration: Tool Selection

In Content Migration: Manual or Automated?, I discussed content migrations. Specifically, I discussed how you determine what content to migrate manually and what content to automate the migration for. Once that has been done, you can focus on defining the tools and techniques. In this post, I’ll discuss types of tools and techniques you can use to automate migrations. You can select from the many tools that are available, build your own, or do a bit of both. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

A good place to start your tools analysis is with the new platform that you are migrating to. Many content management platforms provide their own migration tools. Often, these tools are targeted at specific use cases. For example, if you are migrating AEM from on-premise to AEM Cloud Service, you may be able to use the Content Transfer Tool. If your use case lines up with the intended use case, these tools work well. If your use case does not line up with a vendor-provided migration tool, then you need to consider other tools in the market or build your own.

A tried and tested method of content migration is to build a custom migration. While considerably more effort than using a vendor-provided tool, building a custom migration gives you great flexibility in how the migration happens, granting you control over the process and allowing you to build custom logic for any business requirements. And while you have additional flexibility and control, building a custom migration will use resources, like time and money, that could be used on other projects.

If you do not have the internal resources or budget to build your own, there are many off-the-shelf tools that can be used. These tools are built to migrate content into various platforms and have already been programmed to handle many use cases. The tools can make it easy to migrate simpler pages and to do so quickly.

Increasingly, AI is being incorporated into migration tools. Having the power of AI to help recognize patterns and build pages can be a huge timesaver. To realize that time savings, the AI tool will need to be diligently trained to recognize the patterns and build the pages. Often forgotten are just how many decisions are made by the content authors when building a page. All that knowledge needs to be learned by the tool, so plan your resources and timeline accordingly.

As with anything, when it comes to these tools your milage may vary. It is especially important to match your requirements with the tool’s features to make sure the tool is a good fit. Recently, I have been involved with helping a client get the most from a SaaS-based AEM content migration tool. The tool leverages AI as it ingests content to build the new pages based on its training.

Training is the key component to successful migrations with AI-based tools. Enough patterns need to be provided for the tool to make good choices. If the tool has too few patterns, it will force everything from the original page into the patterns it knows. However, having too many patterns can lead to inconsistent results. In general, the SaaS-based tool I worked with did better with more training, but the tool struggled with the more complex pages.

Today you have many options for automated content migration. When it works well, migration automation increases the efficiency and accuracy of the results. As with any project, to be successful, you need to plan carefully and ensure the project has ample resources regardless of the tool.