VSO Case Study - How Fry-IT helped VSO migrate their Intranet to Plone

"Fry-IT have done an amazing job getting the content migrated" (Stuart McSkimming – IT Development Manager)

The Problem

"VSO had a strategic plan to migrate their present Intranet platform to an Open Source platform based on Plone. The fact that other large not-for-profit organisations such as Oxfam were taking up Plone and the flexibility, ease of use as well as the Open Source ethos all helped inform this decision. They also needed to give greater accessibility to overseas offices and standardise on a platform which had support available throughout the world.

The task was therefore to take their present bespoke Intranet and migrate all the content to a new Plone platform. VSO also required improvements and further development of their new Plone Intranet. This task was not straightforward: there were over 5000 items of content to move to the new system. "

The Solution

"VSO realised that they needed outside expertise to help them achieve their plan. They got in touch with Fry-IT and asked for help in solving their problem. Fry-IT worked very closely with the development team at VSO to understand their issues and work out a satisfactory solution. The time-lines for completion we very tight, to say the least!

Fry-IT created the sophisticated scripts required to automatically transfer the data from the old (but still live) Intranet site. They also carried out the development brief for the new Plone site. A complete solution was then created with a new Plone Intranet containing all the content from the old Intranet site and the functionality required for the new site.

The team at Fry-IT also spent considerable time working within the VSO offices to train and pass on knowledge to the in-house VSO development team. At the same time Fry-IT created the necessary documentation of the migration and development processes. Both teams are very proud and happy with the final outcome."

"We were impressed with the focused effort Fry-IT gave to help us get the work completed. We had been let down by another company and achieving this quickly was a priority for us. Despite some initial headaches, we got very satisfactory results. We will call on Fry-IT again when we need extra Plone capacity." (Alison Corfield – IT Director)

1st of August 2006