Yesterday I had the honour of acting as moderator in our first community of practice meeting in 2009. Interestingly, I met two member organisations at the meeting that were still using Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS) 2002, even though the product was originally released back in July 2001. One of the organisations is planning to “upgrade” to SharePoint 2007 during 2009, while the other is in the process of migrating an important site onto Microsoft CMS 2002.
This is a scenario you will find not just here in Aarhus, Denmark, but around the world: Microsoft CMS 2002 SP2, which is the most recent and final release from Microsoft, is still actively used in many organisations, which have had other things to do than upgrading to SharePoint 2007 or changing their CMS every 3 years.
Here’s my advice for those of you working with Microsoft CMS 2002:
- The upgrade to SharePoint 2007 is actually more like a replacement, and far from as easy as Microsoft described it in their letter to Content Management Server customers in 2006. It might be a better idea to wait for Office 14, due out in beta later this year.
- Many implementation partners have created custom-built modules for CMS 2002, which will offer you additional functionality and shorten implementation times, but will add complexity to future upgrades. You could easily end up being locked to your implementation partner.
- If you need search, remember that CMS has no search engine at all, and you will need to integrate with a third-party product.
- For new projects, make sure you implement harmless URL’s, hereby preventing problems later on.
- Product training is key as the interface will not seem modern to young colleagues, nor will it seem intuitive to older colleagues. They will need some time to get used to the interface.
Are you also using CMS 2002? Do you have any advice to share?
Lisa Garcia January 19th, 2009 18:31
Yes, we are still using Microsoft CMS 2002. Having a lot of problems with it, though. Planning to upgrade do Sharepoint 2007, but in the process of researching, I’m still not totally convinced that this would be our best option, since we do need powerful search capabilities (we’re a government portal with over 80 government services/departments each with its own channel on the portal). Would love to hear from all of you out there still using CMS 2002 or with any views on this, as I myself am not technical, although I am involved in the decision-making process.
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Shawn Shell February 24th, 2009 18:31
We just released a program to help clients migrate from MCMS 2002 to SharePoint. In addition, we can migrate them another WCM of their choice as well. Details can be found on our web site: http://www.consejoinc.com/solutions/Microsoft_CMS_Upgrade.aspx
That aside, to facilitate any migration from MCMS, I would offer a few suggestions:
1) Make sure to document the site. This includes all of the customizations within MCMS (since that was pretty common), in addition to templates, resources (both internal and shared in the galleries), navigation logic and so on. Whether or not the newly migrated web site is an exact replica or not, having good documentation will just make any migration project smoother.
2) If the site supports multi-lingual content, a SharePoint upgrade may not be straight forward. Since MCMS had no formalized approach to localized content, clients were free to handling that content as they chose. With SharePoint, the process and architecture is very structured and may not support the approach chosen by the existing site on MCMS. This is actually true of other tools like RedDot as well. Be sure to clearly understand your needs with regard to localized content and the process to contribute that content to the site.
3) If the site will continue to run on Microsoft technology, migrations from MCMS 2002 will be easier if clients take the time to reduce the number of templates used AND if those templates are well-structured into components (e.g. user controls, server controls and well-organized HTML). This is work that won’t be wasted, since any controls that don’t specifically leverage MCMS functionality can be reused with the new WCM tool. Plus, reducing the number of templates will reduce the time to migrate to the new WCM technology.
4) Find a way to extract all of the content in a generic format (like XML) to enable a content archive (for historically reference), potentially automating content import to the new WCM tool and to ensure no content is missed in the migration. We developed a utility that extracts all of the content from MCMS; we use this utility in our engagements with clients, but also sell it as a stand alone product. Our utility is a pretty simple extraction tool, but more robust solutions can also be licensed from Metalogix and others. What ever you choose, find a way to extract the content from the MCMS repository prior to the migration.
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