It's fairly hot & sticky here in Glasgow as we near the end of our 236th week at Mimtech! We've had a hectic week with all hands on deck supporting the National College Internal Portal project. This is a fairly recent start with very tight timescales so we're enjoying a bit of agile development!

Louis and I were with Quinn Group in Derrylin, Co. Fermanagh on Tuesday / Wednesday this week talking about implementing EPiServer as the WCM to support 10+ B2B websites, an intranet and integration with a legacy AS 400 system. We're excited about that opportunity, Quinn Group is a multinational organisation with a hugely diverse range of industry sectors and we'd be very proud to have them as a client.

The brand & design phase for Scottish Ten is nearing completion and the output from that is impressive, it's going to be a great looking site. More to follow on that project as it progresses.

So it's all go, plus we've got a weekend of sport to look forward to with the eager anticipation and hope of Murray progressing into the finals at Wimbledon and Germany efficiently despatching Argentina as I've got them in the sweepstake.

Cheers,
John

There are some clever people out there and then there are the exceptional. Imagine being able to digitally document all of our built heritage, our cultural and historical landmarks, the architectural wonders of the world that we live in so that forever more these places can be visited even though the physical bricks & mortar may have long since succumbed to the ravages of time or the physical visitor is unable to make the trip.

This is exactly the purpose of a pioneering conservation project currently underway to create virtual models of 10 World Heritage sites. Scottish 10 is a £1.3 million project funded by the Scottish Government and being carried out by The Centre for Digital Documentation and Visualisation LLP (CDDV) which sees a strategic collaboration between Historic Scotland and The Digital Design Studio (DDS) at Glasgow School of Art.

The Scots team are currently onsite at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota which is the first international site to be scanned. The project comprises five Scottish sites at New Lanark, The Antonine Wall, St Kilda, Heart of Neolithic Orkney, and the Old and New towns of Edinburgh plus five international sites. Beyond Mount Rushmore the other international sites are likely to include China, India, Japan and one other yet to be confirmed.

Check this BBC new article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8651175.stm

But where does Mimtech fit into all of this? Well, other than being incredibly excited about the opportunities, knowledge and absolute joy that a project of this magnitude and public interest will generate and other than a healthy borderline fetish for the technology involved we’re also very proud to have won the contract to build the website to support the project. The richness of data and content that CDDV generate as part of each on site scan means that we have a myriad of media to play with including flash, video, 3D point cloud data, mapping and social media technologies as well as some spectacular on site imagery. We’re excited about this project, can you tell?

2010 has been very exciting so far with our move to new offices in January and first quarter revenue up 87% from the same period last year. Now at the beginning of April we're delighted to introduce our brand values; innovation, quality, value and fun.

Built around the core message, "Web strategies, solutions and support that empower organisations to engage their audience in the digital economy," our brand values influence how we operate as a company and what you should expect when engaging with us.

As a service based company quality and value are key factors in establishing and maintaining client relationships and building trust. Without embracing innovation we simply wouldn't survive. Fun is the major component in our ability to deliver our client experience and to grow our business, if we didn't enjoy what we do we wouldn't be doing it.

2010 looks like it's going to be a very exciting year for Mimtech and to kick things off we're moving to new offices. After four years in the Strathclyde University Incubator we're moving to our new home in West George Street in the heart of Glasgow's business area.

234 West George Street,
Glasgow G2 4QY,
Scotland,
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)141 226 1666

We've been over the figures and I thought it would be interesting to highlight a few metrics from our recent migration from Obtree/Livelink WCM to RedDot for Salford City Council.

We migrated 6 sites in total. Here are some figures from the largest of these www.salford.gov.uk. The site contained about 9000 pages and about 9500 digital files (images, pdf's etc). Using the mim:switch migration tool and our migration methodology we migrated all of this into RedDot. The live run created the new pages in RedDot, added all of the digital files to the RedDot CMS and updated all of the pages with the content and updated references (so that the images came from the CMS and the links to pages were correct for the new pages).The site structure was recreated automatically and all of the required metadata and custom property data were taken across. This took just 50.5 hours. Imagine creating 9000 pages manually. A very generous under-estimate might propose 15 minutes per page to create the page, upload the necessary images etc, add the text and metadata, make sure that links to other pages were changed to the new url check it's in the right part of the site. It would take 228 days to do what we did in 50.5 hours. And our tool doesn't get bored or  make human errors.

 There is a lot more to any migration project than this of course, but this part is a requirement of any migration and the time/cost savings are pretty clear I think.

• c.9000 pages
• c.9500 digital files
• site structure
• updated links and references
• all required metadata

50.5 hours or 228 days - what would you choose?

If you would like to find out more about this migration or how we might help you, please get in touch.