Audit both ways
The easiest way to catalogue your site is undoubtedly from the top down. Use a crawler to follow links and uncover content and assets in a similar fashion to a search engine. However, for an Ektron site this may only provide part of the picture. With a little bit of Ektron API wrangling, you can build a much more accurate understanding, encompassing how and where content is represented within the CMS. You can cover areas such as template use, PageBuilder components, structured vs unstructured content, taxonomy, DMS managed documents, redirects and marketing URLs.
This will prove invaluable when mapping legacy Ektron content against new Episerver content models. It will also help you identify candidates for scripted migration (typically well structured content) and content that will need to be refactored or manually entered. You should also be able to identify ‘problem’ areas for migration, such as extensive Ektron taxonomy use, complex SmartForms and multiple page aliases. These need a different treatment in Episerver.
Identify your customisations and integrations
If you’ve been running on Ektron for a number of years, it’s likely you’ve customised the platform far beyond new content types and templates. There could be custom widgets, workflows, website tools, forms, external data feeds or integrations with other platforms.
You can't simply pull your customisations from the legacy site and plop them into the new one. As Episerver runs on ASP.NET MVC, rather than Ektron’s ASP.NET Web Forms, migrating or recreating site customisations will likely require refactoring or rebuilding. Although any integration points with external feeds or platforms may not change, the way in which the CMS processes or consumes data through those integrations will.
You’ll find that Episerver is a significantly more efficient, developer-friendly and maintainable platform. The experience of our own developers is that implementing custom functionality is significantly less difficult than it might have been on Ektron. And given Episerver’s much broader feature set, there’s a chance that the functionality you require is already supported by the platform.