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?

I have been away for a few days but the Salford City Council migration project has charged relentlessly towards a successful conclusion. The five smaller sites have all gone live and the main site is with the Council for UAT. There is still a bit of work to do at their end getting all of their forms, workflow processes etc in place but it looks like we have had a very successful project migrating the content of 6 sites from Obtree (Livelink WCM PS) to RedDot.

We are putting together all of the metrics from the project (number of pages, time to migrate, tolerance levels etc) into a case study which will be available once the project is signed off. In the meantime if anyone is interested in finding out more about our Obtree migration tool or would like to see a demo migration from Obtree to RedDot, EPiServer or Immediacy, please get in touch.

The last phase is now well under way with the five smaller sites already extracted and on their way into RedDot (actually we kicked it off on Friday night as it can take a while). These should be released for UAT over the next few days and the main Salford site gets under way later this week. This phase should be relatively straight forward as the development runs will have shown up any issues but still nice to see it all running smoothly so far. However, we've been on enough projects over the years to stop us getting complacent.

We have recently carried out an migration test run of a client's site from Livelink WCM PS to RedDot and I thought I'd share the results. The analysis phase took about 18 hours to complete and revealed over 9000 pages and more than 8000 digital objects (images and documents). The time taken was slightly longer than expected but still reasonable . The extraction itself surprised us by only taking six hours. That's to extract every object from the repository and all the attributes, custom properties and relationship data; every version and every instance. as this was a test run the RedDot environment used is fairly basic and all text objects were mapped to a simple page template but we did create all 9000 plus pages and recreate the site structure and then populate these pages with the correct content and updated references and links in about 8 hours. That's about 3 days in total for a simple migration of 9000 pages and 8000 digital assets. To do the same in a manual copy and paste way would take approximately 350 days. That's to do the same like for like migration.

Now, there is far more to a migration than we have done here but the extra effort around planning transformation, rules definition and so on is the same for both. The effort of checking and correction is likely to be higher for the manual method too. The main point here is that mim:switch is much faster than a manual migration where the content is appropriate. If you would like to know more have a look at the web site or contact us for a WebEx demo or to talk to us.

We recently launched a promotion to encourage Obtree/Livelink WCM users to view a demo of our Obtree migration software offering a free site audit and anlysis report to the lucky client drawn from those who had viewed a demo. The January draw has been completed and the winner is Salford City Council.

I look forward to seeing the results of the analysis in due course.  There are still another two draws in March and May so sign up for a demo and get in the pot for the next draw. See our web site for more details.