Upgrade or Rebuild: The World Steel Associations Upgrade to Magnolia 4.5

Upgrade or rebuild?The Magnolia upgrade for Worldsteel

The dilemma“Ok guys, so we need to take the next step here with our website, don’t you think?”

“Huh? What are you talking about, we just finished this huge project implementing the current one last year?”

“Yeah, I know, but that took us three years, so now we need a new one again… sorry”

“Oh well, great. So what do we need now?”

“Well, uhhm…we need to upgrade to the next version of our CMS, otherwise we’ll lose tech support in a while”

“And what will that bring us from a marketing perspective? Since I’m paying you know…”

“Let’s see, well,… ahh, it’s really important for security stuff???”

@edbananemanEdgar VonkRemmert Stipdonk

Your presenters:

@remstip

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Banking, Asset Management, Business Banking and Corporate Finance and

Securities.

Van Lanschot Magnolia upgrade

Online dialoguewith personalisation

JSP templatesand no STK

Issues withmigration scripts

The Magnolia upgrade for worldsteel

The World Steel AssociationThe World Steel Association, in short worldsteel, is the association for the steel

industry. Worldsteel provides global leadership on all major strategic issues

affecting the industry, particularly focusing on economic, environmental and

social sustainability.

Magnolia implementation

Multi-language

Custom-made .NETmember database

Multi site environment:Internet, extranet and intranet

Intake in 2012

Completed in 2014

Upgrade in 2013

Rebuild member database

Responsive design implementation

Upgrade Magnolia 5

2014-2015:

Until now:

Some details

Extranet with 5000 users

Very, very complex security

Before Magnolia, worldsteel used Sharepoint as a CMS

and 50 GB of documents in the DMS

Started on Magnolia 4.3.5

even more details

15.000 lines of code

400 XML Magnolia configuration files

140 Freemarker template scripts

Member database is a black box

Lots of customisations in AdminCentral

How we prepared ourselves

Functional analysis

Source code inspection

Technical analysis

Preparations for the full takeover

As you see: some serious preparations!

source code cleanup

setup OTAP

takeover of support

setup of procedures

What we thought the project would be like

What the project was really like

Thanks go out to

Previous implementation partner Uniway

The Magnolia support team!

Wordsteel for their patience, help and understanding

Hosting provider Nucleus

Pitfalls

Pitfalls

Lack of documentation and testing means lots of guessing

Content migration is really hard to test and still it failed on the real content

Customisations of the AdminCentral were hard to migrate

Lots of code was hard-copied from Magnolia sources and then customised. Extend where possible!

…and some more advice

Rebuild of the shop was required and extending Magnolia modules is not always easy..

The Magnolia Upgrade tool has its limits

Clean up as much (legacy) code as possible

Decision making

So…should we upgrade or should

we rebuild?

Is your Magnolia version lower than 4.4?

NO YES

Rebuild

Has AdminCentral been seriously customised?

NO YES

Rebuild

Do the templates deviate much from the STK or is Freemarker not used?

NO YES

Rebuild

Is the implementation done by an experienced Magnolia partner?

NO YES

Rebuild

Did the partner apply the Magnolia Best Practices?

NO YES

Rebuild

Were all the previous questions answered positively?

NO YES

UPGRADE AWAY!

But beware of the following upgrade challenges:

A customised workflow engine is difficult to upgrade

The bigger the database, the more difficult to upgrade

Upgrades will always take loads of testing labour

Upgrades will always be hard to impact

Magnolia partners have tech support, so have a partner do the upgrade

Remember, rebuilding means:

Content migration or re-creation

Possible redesign for newer browsers and multi-channel support

Testing, testing, testing

Requirements gathering; beware of the scope creep

The conclusion“So OK I will admit, it was a bumpy ride”

“Well yes, but what matters is the end result. And now we’re ready for the coming years, aren’t we?”

“Yes, we are. The next upgrade will be a lot easier, I promise.”

“Sure, I know you by now…”

“But as a matter of fact we now have an up to date, secure, future proof CMS implementation.”.

“Great, then let’s do something with personalisation then. That’s what the people want.”

“Let’s GO!”

Edgar Vonk

edgar@info.nl

Remmert Stipdonk

remmert@info.nl

Thank you!