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After a much needed extended holiday of 3 weeks in South Africa I'm feeling rested and recharged to attack the year.

I finished off last year with a massive website migration between a legacy CMS to the new SiteCore CMS, with nothing of great value to post I thought I’d wait until post migration to document the process. SiteCore CMS has a great built in API method set to handle migrating data from legacy systems and the only trouble I found was extracting the correct data from the legacy CMS. I exported the source database into an intermediate XML based database, this means that I could just serialize the database objects and pass them directly to the Sitecore API. The Sitecore API basically takes a XML schema structure for an ‘item’ as a parameter and then all associated data is structured to fill.

All in all, migrating about 5 gigs of really tricky sql2000 tables into and xml database and then into SiteCore took about half an hour (my machine probably needs a rebuild) and the setting up of templates and tweaking was about a month pre-migration. Most of the tweaking involved finding the correct correlating data in the legacy CMS and building better tables from that data to be imported into sitecore.

I found this article http://www.cassidy.dk/blog/sitecore/2009/04/migrating-data-into-sitecore.html very helpfull on designing my approach to the migration. I made a few slight changes to my project and found a few more generic and reliable methods of creating the import functionality.

I’ll document this soon with screenshots and code snippets.