We are happy to announce that on Thursday 31 October we will begin the live migration from the OpenText Content Management System (CMS) to Terminalfour (T4). The plan is as follows.
Thursday 31 October - Live migration begins
A copy of the live website is taken, and the vendor begins the process of programmatically importing all OpenText content into T4. At this point any changes made in OpenText will not be reflected in the T4 site (see more below). This stage of the process will take three weeks.
Wednesday 20 November - Migration Handover
The vendor hands over the T4 site to our project team who have two weeks to check the migrated content, install all associated applications, configure our T4 site, and manually migrate everything that couldn't be picked up in the vendor's migration.
Thursday 5 December - Go Live
The new T4 site will replace the OpenText site.
We sincerely hope there will be no changes to this schedule but if there are we will let you know as soon as we possibly can.
Content changes during live migration
As mentioned in previous emails, there will be no "content freeze" during the live migration and you will not be locked out of OpenText. However, if you make any changes in OpenText between 31 October and 5 December they will not be automatically reflected in the T4 site. You will have to make those changes in T4 after it has been handed over to you. We realise that some content changes are unavoidable and, as promised, we will provide you with access to change reports for your section. The OpenText site will still be available to staff at a different address for a limited time allowing you to compare content.
Please remember that the only changes not transferred to T4 during this time are those made to pages managed via OpenText. You won’t need to reproduce changes made via News, Events, Blogs, Prospectus, Staff Profiles or any other university content application.
Training
We have invited around 200 people to train with around 100 people completing some or all of the training. We still have many more invites to send, so please don't worry if you haven't received an invitation yet. If you have received an invitation and will regularly update content in T4 please try and find the time to complete the training by mid-November so that you get the most benefit from the new system. We recommend you complete all 3 levels if you can. Feedback on the training has been overwhelmingly positive and participants have told us it takes between 5-8 hours in total. If you have received an invite but do not require training, please let us know as soon as possible.
If you have any questions, contact digital-comms@abdn.ac.uk. Please be patient if we take longer than usual to get back to you. Between the migration preparation and training rollout we will be incredibly busy for the next couple of months.
For more background on the project please visit https://www.abdn.ac.uk/digital/terminalfour.php (staff login required).