VSO

Successfully moving 5000 items of content to a new Open Source platform. And all in double-quick time.

The challenge

VSO is a leading development charity that sends volunteers to work abroad with full financial support. Their strategic plan was to migrate their present Intranet platform to an Open Source platform based on the Plone content management system.

The decision to move to Plone was informed by its flexibility, ease of use, open-source ethos, and the fact that other large not-for-profit organisations such as Oxfam were taking it up. VSO also wished to give greater accessibility to overseas offices and to standardise on a platform that had support available throughout the world.

The task was therefore to migrate all the content from the present bespoke Intranet onto to a new Plone platform. This was a complex task as there were over 5000 items of content to move to the new system. VSO also required improvements and further development of their new Plone Intranet.

The solution

Realising that they needed outside expertise, VSO got in touch with fry. We worked closely with their development team to understand the issues and work out a satisfactory solution. The time-lines for completion were very tight, to say the least!

fry created the sophisticated scripts required to automatically transfer the data from the old (but still live) Intranet site. We also carried out the development brief for the new Plone site.

The result

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 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 we 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 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 again when we need extra Plone capacity.” Alison Corfield – IT Director, VSO