It's been a while since I added anything to this blog but I read an email from Tony Byrne at the Real Story (CMS Watch to you and me) and felt compelled to quote something in his newsletter. I am not saying I agree but he is a highly respected industry analyst...

'The product formerly known as RedDot is losing altitude at a precipitous rate. Alterian is discontinuing its .NET-based offering (the former Immediacy product).'

We have seen a disappointing response to RedDot but I have no knowledge of the discontinuation of Immediacy. Tony does comment in the same newsletter about the vibrancy of other players in the same space including our favourite EPiServer.

We have finished the migration of Salford City Council's Obtree sites to RedDot. Six sites have now gone live and are working well. The migration itself was, in my humble opinion, a resounding success. The issues we had were not technical but process and you can always learn from those for the next one. Well done to Chandra, Ken and the team for bringing this one in on time and budget. We are preparing a case study to document the project and will make the metrics available so you will be able to see how much more effective the mim:switch software is than the manual or other automated options.

We have already been commissioned to begin the next one and are in discussions about another two.

We are hoping to have the opportunity for a migration from Obtree to EPiServer soon (the test migrations to EPiServer are quicker than those to RedDot) and we are looking forward to that.

If you are a user of Obtree (Livelink WCM PS) and would like to know what options you have for migrating to a new platform please get in touch.

I have just read an announcement about the Open Text 2010 roadmap. This covered the full suite but the bit that caught my eye was...

'Open Text said that 2012 will see the release of a new Web Business app that combines Vignette content management tools with its own web solutions' (that's RedDot to you and me) '. This will create a platform and application framework with enhanced content modelling and "templating", richer in-context editing for non-technical users and faster web site deployment, according to the firm.'

My understanding is that RedDot and Vignette are built on very different technologies (I may be wrong) so I guess OT have a mammoth task ahead to join the two together. I'm interested to see the result.

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.

Well it's all gone to plan so far (more or less - one small glitch last Thursday but that's a lesson learned for the next one) and all six of the Salford sites are into RedDot. Just the tidy up to do on the main site and then hand over for QA. We expect the five smaller sites to go live this week, the big one will take a little longer to QA and catch up with the content freeze backlog.

We have also been receiving a lot of inquiries about the migration service. Salford City Council have been gracious enough to permit us to use this project as a case study so that will be produced and circulated very soon.