Meeting Minutes
A meeting with WordPress Unit Web Coordinators regarding the site migration process.
Migration Updates:
An August 1 deadline has been established for the discontinuation of Ektron content management system for NAU. In order to meet the August 1 deadline established for discontinuation of Ektron, the site creation and migration process must change significantly. ITS has partnered with the vendor WordHerd to achieve a mass migration before this deadline. We want to avoid juggling Ektron and WordPress sites and mitigate potential summer site steward and publisher gaps for anyone on a 9 month contract, etc.
This process will automatically migrate the pages on Ektron to WordPress to avoid working within both systems.
Site improvement work, such as addressing information architecture, consolidating pages, and improving content will take place after the sites have migrated off of Ektron.
Process:
Prior to migrating all content, the Web team will be analyzing Ektron content, sites, and inventory to ensure necessary content is migrated. WordHerd will map Ektron content to the appropriate WordPress fields. WordPress shortcodes were designed to be a 1:1 copy of existing content blocks, so the mapping should be straightforward. WordHerd will also provide redirects as a part of their processes.
Units will need to identify site stewards who haven’t already been identified because they’ll will enter the process to address things after the WordHerd mass migration. If sites haven’t done any work, WordHerd will migrate your content, at which time you can be added to the fully supported migration process for overhauling your site.
Ektron has about 10k pages and hundreds of sites live today, so the QA and review process will not be as in-depth for the initial migration. There will be spot checks of various pages and page types to ensure quality. These spot checks may only go as deep on one click away from the sites home page. Full review of content, information architecture, accessibility, and marketing concerns will take place when sites do their work after migration.
Site Improve is a tool that the web team has been exploring to examine sites to look for code, flag accessibility, perform certain QA tasks, and identify link concerns. Custom policies can even be created so that we can look for specific issues as a part of the process. This tool will identify problems that may have required manual efforts before.
Individual units will be granted access to Site Improve so units can look for specific issues. The Site Improve license has unlimited user accounts in order to utilize this powerful tool. The Web team, Disability Resources, and Marketing will have broad reports, but individual units can look at reports specific to their issues.
The WordHerd migration is funded completely by ITS. WordHerd is a one-time, per page fee.
The web team is gathering information about existing sites and work happening within their units. This report will be sent to all Unit Web Coordinators.
Moving forward, ITS will focus on business units, Marketing will focus on academic units.
Those who have requested a site but are now waiting for the migration will need to a send a separate email, not addressed to WCM support.
Post migration launch:
After the migration is complete, work will begin on identifying content that can live on the NAU intranet, which is still being developed. Ektron is currently 100 percent available to the public, which won’t change with the migration. Moving things to the intranet will happen after migration.
Migration is only Ektron to WordPress. Anything that is a custom application built to look like Ektron, such as sites that have “www2” or something similar in the URL, or sites that are hosted on Jan, will not be included in the migration. These types of sites will be a separate project, handled within the unit. The NAU enterprise them can be applied to some custom web apps, so they’re “re-skinned” to match the WordPress theme.
Special circumstances such as grants, accreditation and other deadlines that might impact a summer migration can be dealt with on a unit-by-unit, case-by-case basis.
Sites that have involved in the DIY process with significant progress made to their site can aim for a mid-May to be launch ready. These sites will not be included in the WordHerd Migration. DIY sites that are between “little progress” and “no progress” can potentially stay in Stage to be moved over after the migration.
Those involved with web for their unit who have not yet attended training will have to attend training to edit their site post-migration. The migrated site are only clones of the Ektron sites that have been formatted to fit within WordPress. Editing and improving the sites is still necessary unless the units are completely with their site as is.
In the time before the migration ITS will transfer everything from a unit’s site included their collected documents so the unit can then work with Usable Materials to ensure accessibility.
Changes made to Ektron pages after the migration and before the WordPress launch can be captured and implemented by ITS. ITS will communicate when the deadline is for these kind of changes.