I'm curious to see if anyone has any experience in migrating from that lovely .NET app known as Ektron. I'm trying to get associated documents from it, and the way Ektron stores docs is incredibly convoluted and relies on some Windows services. I'm researching how it's all linked together, but if anyone has some knowledge they could share with me on how to get those docs as part of a migration, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Comments

mikeryan’s picture

mikeryan
he/him
Primary language English
Location Pittsfield, MA, USA
commented

I've heard that question before, but haven't heard of anyone implementing a migration from Ektron.

mikeryan’s picture

mikeryan
he/him
Primary language English
Location Pittsfield, MA, USA
commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Looks like nobody's got anything to say on the issue...

apotek’s picture

apotek commented

I don't know anything about Ektron, but I'll share an approach we took to a similar problem, and maybe it will fit your case.

In our situation we were migrating from a very old and convoluted system where it was very difficult to keep track of dependencies and even, in some cases, to know which tables were still relevant or not, and also very difficult to find attached binary assets to data points.

Rather than try to piece this all together by hand, we took advantage of the fact that our legacy system, using all its old code, could spit out XML representations of each object in the system. So we set up an XML based migration rather than a sql based migration. It slowed the migration down by a huge factor, but at least we didn't have to try to understand an application that had grown hopelessly thorny and convoluted.

Perhaps Ektron has some kind of rss or xml or json service (or plugin that would provide such a service). If so, you could let Ektron itself handle all the assembly of the various disparate parts (doc paths, service calls etc), and just give you the objects in XML or JSON format, and migrate from that.

Just a thought.

wonder95’s picture

wonder95 commented

Yeah, this one ended up being real pain. Part of it was poor db design, and part CMS design. We were unable to link pieces of content together as we would have liked, but so I just had to migrate the content that I could and have the client link them together later. Ektron has a number of web services available, but none of them really gave me what I needed, so I just ended up having to pull directly from the db after a ton of db analysis. From what the Ektron tech support guy told me, there are ways to link content that would have made it much easier on me, but for some reason those methods weren't used on this particular site.