Sitecore Data Migration (ETL)

Question

We are process of replacing the Sitecore 6.6 with Sitecore 7.2. There are thousands of news articles that needs to migrated to new platform.

The problem here is that we have updated the data templates for news by removing lots of fields and introducing few more. We also re-organized the data source that's being used by news item e.g. location for categories, author drop down list etc.

Therefore, the we need to not only migrate but also transform by removing unnecessary fields , re-mapping the old to new fields etc.

Could someone please advise with you experience on recommending the best tool e.g. custom tool, third party tool etc.

Answer 1

Would need to know more about your specifics, to truly give you a complete answer. But I can give you some pointers.

For the most of what you mention, you would not really be needing a tool. In bullet form:

• Reorganising data, where authors sit etc. Assuming you've been using "link" type fields in Sitecore, reorganizing data would not require you to act. Sitecore would have stored all your references as IDs, and these presumably would not have changed.
• As for your field data sources, these would need to be updated manually. But you would have less than a dozen or so (I assume) templates, so it shouldn't really be a monumental task.
• Removing existing fields. Well this is fine, you can remove them before or after the move - again no tool required. Your code might need updating though.
• Adding new fields, no action required.

So I guess the devil lies in the details here; the nature of your migration. If you need to do any sort of "re-fielding" of your content; i.e. "combine the values of FieldA and FieldB and store them in the new FieldC" - if this is the case, you are right in asking for a tool.

The bad news is, I know of no such tool. I would probably approach this, by just writing a migration script and move the data across. One easy way to achieve this, is to take (roughly) these steps:

• Set up your new information architecture in Sitecore 7, the way you want it to be
• Attach your Sitecore 6 database as database "legacy". We're in a grey area here, I'm sure attaching a 6x database to a 7x instance is unsupported. That being said, I would not be surprised if it just worked.
• Run your migration code, that reads from "legacy" and stores in the new home in "master".

Lots of details I cannot include in the above, because I know so little about your implementation. Expect to write some code however.