Introduction
Recently we were involved in migration project for one of the top 20 fastest growing County Government of United States. The County had been using the Broadvision portal and content management system for its primary internet site. This site involved about 4000 pages involving around 10,000 plus granular content, around 30 small and large applications and 18 GB of static content accessed by 70,000 plus citizens and managed by 30 publishers.
Their main purpose of migration was to switch to another content management system which provides ease of use to their non technical publishers, stability, extensibility and most important, cut down their cost to minimum. After careful analysis they selected Alfresco WCM and JBoss Portal.
All the content was migration to Alfresco Content Management System and the Applications were migrated as application portlet JBoss.
Migration Strategy
Below are the main steps that were involved in the content migration process.
Step 1 - Broadvision Content Model Analysis
As lots of customizations were done on existing Broadvision, we studies deeply different content models of Broadvision. We came down to 15 primary content types which also involved few customized content types. As the Broadvision development was done over a period of time, most of the Broadvision code involved lots of patches which made the whole content type analysis pretty hard.
- Broadvision had top most hierarchy as User Templates. User Templates defined which type of users should see what type of content.
- A single User Template then included different types of users and groups allowed to access the template and different channels (pages) visible on the template.
- A Channel is a page in Broadvision and it includes Sub Channels and Programs.
- A Program is a reference to set of content that will appear on a single Channel.
- A Program referred to different types of Content Category and Types which resulted to 15 distinct types. It also referred to which application is visible on the page.
Step 2 – Migration Design Approach
The whole Migration was divided in to two separate processes, Content Migration and Application Migration. Content Migration involved migration of page content of Broadvision and Application Migration involved migrating 30 small and large J2EE applications of Broadvision to JBoss Portlets and creating Pages from Channels of Broadvision.
After careful analysis of Broadvision content model, Alfresco Web Forms were design to hold the content of Broadvision. We designed Web Forms generic enough to hold multiple types of Broadvision content types in to a single Web Form which reduced distinct content types from 15 in Broadvision to 5 in Alfresco.
Step 3 – Migration of Content
As Broadvision is totally database oriented application, all html content resided in database. There was lots of customization done on out of box Broadvision Tables over a period of time. We studied the relationship between each table then we went in to the code of Broadvision which was implemented in Struts.
We prepared a Migration Tool which read the database tables of Broadvision and migrated content to Alfresco using the generic Web Forms of Alfresco. The output of this Migration Tool gave content migrated in Alfresco and an XML file which defined the relationship between the page in JBoss and Content in Alfresco.
The XML was then feed to JBoss Migration Tool which read the XML and created pages in JBoss with distinct properties mentioned in XML. These properties included reference to Alfresco Content, Page Heading, Page Left Navigation Name, Header Image, Header Background Image, Secure Flag (flag to mention https mode of page), Popup Flag (open page in new window), Online Flag (visible/invisible on site) etc.
Step 4 – Migration of Applications
JBoss Migration Tool received XML from Alfresco Migration Tool which contained which pages needs to be created with what properties. All the pages were created which contained a custom developed Portlet which was used to read content from Alfresco.
JBoss Migration tool developed 30 plus Portlet which involved Water Bill Payment module, Managing Bids and RFP’s, various Survey Portlets, Voter registration module, Parks and Recreation module etc and deployed them in to various pages.
The publisher, their group and their rights as Publishers were moved to LDAP and JBoss was integrated with LDAP. Besides Applications, JBoss gave various RSS feeds, Email Alert and Newsletter to over 50,000 registered users on the web site. JBoss also developed various themes catering to the needs of various departments for example, Transportation department had a separate theme.
Step 5 – Functionality Migration
The various functionalities of Broadvision involved inline editing of content, inline creation of content and inline publishing of content to various environments. Now both the systems were divided in two separate systems, we developed a separate UI designed specifically for non technical publishers/administrators to modify content right from JBoss portal.
When publisher would log in to JBoss, depending upon its right to modify the page, Alfresco content would show up edit icons to allow publishers to modify the content. These Edit icons would popup Alfresco Web Scripts which allowed the publishers to edit and save the content. On successful saving of the content, the screens would refresh and give the content modified.
All these functionalities were done in publisher sandbox, so each publisher would never modify anything that would appear on the site until they push those contents to staging sandbox. Once the modification was completed, depending upon the administrative settings, a publisher would publish the content directly to staging or submit it to the reviewers for review.
At no point of time, a publisher needed to log in twice in JBoss and Alfresco. Internal ticketing between the systems were implemented to give Single Sign On experience and make publishers feel as if they are using single system at any given point of time.
Step 6 – Corrections
The whole automated process of migration from Broadvision Portal to JBoss gave around 98% success ratio. But as mentioned earlier the Broadvision was customized heavily and developed over a period of time which had around 2% of content not migrated properly using the Migration Tools. To correct these 2% of content, we had a separate correction script which ran once the Migration Tool was completed.
Thus full migration process was completed with 100% success with over 10000 plus web content, 4000 pages containing 18 GB of static contents and 30 Plus applications.
Adit Patel
Senior Consultant @ CIGNEX.
