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Content Comversion question

System

We have a client who uses teamsite extensively and they wish to roll into their main intranet some content (when I say some, I mean 8000+ pages!) which are currently not content managed and reside in a separate intranet which is being de-commissioned.

Obviously they don't want to do this manually so my question is ... has anyone had any experience in converting large numbers of HTML files into DCR's?

The new pages are expected to make use of the existing presentation template even though the current layout is totally different to that of the main intranet. I am assuming that it ought to be a matter of transforming these into the same DCR format used in the main intranet site.

I have read previously that there was a product called "Content Transformation Services" but I can't find any information on this, does anyone know if this product is still available?

I would love to hear from anyone who has gone through a similar process in the past.

thanks in advance.

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Comments

nipper

You really need a consultant who knows what they are doing. This is not trivial.

There are a few options. Cut and paste is a very common option.

If the HTML is structured (or you can get structured data) you can put it into templates. Sometimes you can strip out everything from the body tags and import that.

Finally there is a company called Nahava that can do this as well. They have some tools and for large numbers of pages it may be warranted.

Jamik

When we first got TeamSite (back on version 5.5) we converted all our intranet sites to TeamSite (~20k+ docs). We did the migration over a year long period. We did the most viewed sites first (used web log reports to see what internal sites were getting the most visits). The first thing you're gonna want to do is an analysis of all the content you want to migrate over to TeamSite. Since our previous sites were frontpage generated we were able to run some reports in frontpage to get doc counts, types of files, etc. We also interviewed the content owners to better understand their content and got them heavily involved in the migration process. We did create a script that auto-generated DCRs based on their html structure, but we still needed the content owners to go through and verify the content. That's probably the biggest time suck is verifying the content migrated over good and fixing any content issues. You're not going to be able to avoid having a bit of manual labor. We took the migration as an opportunity to clean out out-dated and unused content which there was a lot of, most content owners were able to remove 1/3 to 1/2 of their old content through this process.

As nipper points out this is not a trivial task by any means. It's best to plan on having to do a lot of manual work (prepare for the worst).

CRB

as it is already been pointed out, this is not as simple as it might seem to some people and it will be more efficient to just get somebody who has done this before.

we have gone thru this process few months ago but it was for corporate site with 10000s of pages. we had different teams work on different parts of the migration/conversion.

these are some general steps to convert your website to teamsite template based:
+ analyzing the content
+ decide the number and types of templates you will need ( homepage, text/articles, listing , header, footer, page components...)
+ figure out the structure of the DCTs (future DCRs)
+ convert html pages to xml to DCRs: this is the most important and time consuming step. if your html pages are well structured you might be able to convert most of the pages with a perl script, you will still have to do some clean up to the ones converted. you will also have to manually convert the ones that aren't well structured. you might need container template which is textarea to hold any pages that dont fit in any of the template design. the conversion can be simple or complex depending on the templates design. if you just dump all the content into a container then it is simpler than actually maping parts of the page content into specific fields in the DCT.

msrinivas

CTS is something else and would not be helpful in your case. CTS essentially does XML to Word/PDF kind of stuff in conjunction with the workflow engine.

Vamosa is another company that you can talk to about the conversion that you are trying to do.

HTH

Migrateduser

thanks all for your responses, this gives me enough info to go to the client and convince them that there is no quick fix or magic bullet for this.