Episerver (Optimizely) Migration

On our kick-off call we ask questions and seek to understand your needs. We want to know your goals and how you want to use everything Episerver (Optimizely) has to offer. We’ll also loop in the Episerver (Optimizely) team so everyone can get acquainted and we can coordinate any additional meetings or support.

During discovery, our goal is to understand your current implementation, document specific requirements, and refine the scope of work. If you’re doing a Lift & Shift, leveraging your existing design, we’ll map out your current pages and modules to new ones while streamlining to ensure you have a perfect set of easy-to-use modules to work with.   If you’re starting with a fresh new design, we’ll map the designs to new page types and modules.  

In this stage we ensure your new site is not only modern and appealing, but also follows SEO, ADA, and UX best practices.

If you’re redesigning your site, we’ll work with your design agency to understand and implement their vision. We also have UX and design resources so if you want to make some modifications and enhancements to your existing design, we can handle it. Otherwise, we’ll take the basis of your current design and adjust and tweak things as we move them over. 

Our team is here to make sure your team loves your new site, whether you need some minor changes to make content creation easier or to achieve a particular look and feel.

Architecture is the cornerstone of a successful implementation. Once design is approved, we create a Solution Architecture Document to plan out every detail of your migration. This document will define the necessary content organization. We’ll chart out the types of content you have, the pages we’ll build, and the content blocks or modules we’ll use to build them. 

We also look for any opportunities to streamline your implementation, starting with the current modules you have on your site. It’s common for older implementations to have several modules that are similar to each other. Can we combine any of these? Are there any modules you never use or your content team doesn’t like? Are there any modules that we need to add?

With this information, we create a Content Matrix. This outlines each URL from your old CMS, and maps it to the URL on your new Episerver (Optimizely) site, along with the assigned page type and content blocks. This gives your team and ours a foolproof map to follow during the migration.

Next, we embark on development. Using the Solution Architecture Document as our guide, we develop all of the different page types, content blocks, and functionality that will make your new site yours. 

We’ll also develop specialized types of content at this stage that may have additional design or functionality considerations. For example, you may have a News page that pulls in various types of content that you want to display in a particular way. Or, your search functionality may include features like filters and promoted content. Whatever it is, we’ll build it.

After each round of development, our QA Specialists will comb through everything before we push to UAT for your final approval.

Now it’s time for training. We create detailed, step-by-step training documentation, illustrated with screenshots of your Episerver (Optimizely) implementation. 

We’ll also host virtual training sessions to walk your team through everything they need to know and answer any questions they have about how to do their job on your new site. We record these video calls so you can rewatch whenever you need a refresher.

During the migration, our team automates content migration where we can. We’ll review your current implementation and look for structured data like events, blogs, or products to see if there’s any content we can extract and push directly into Episerver (Optimizely) — minimizing the amount of manual migration that needs to happen. 

For everything else, we move it over to Episerver (Optimizely) manually. If your team wants to dig in and use their training to help with the migration, we’re all for it. Whether you want us to handle the entire migration soup to nuts, or coach your team along the way, we’re here to keep your Episerver (Optimizely) migration on track and ensure everything gets moved over without a hiccup.

It’s go time! Our team will perform a final comprehensive review of everything. If all looks good, we’ll launch! 

The weeks following launch are dedicated to more personalized training sessions with your team, ensuring you feel comfortable and confident using your new Episerver (Optimizely) implementation.

Most partners will just work off a basic planning spreadsheet for your solution architecture. Not us. For Engagency, that spreadsheet is merely a precursor to our 100+ page Architecture Document.

We go into a lot of detail and planning upfront to ensure we capture the functionality of the designs that are presented — and avoid scope and budget creep later. Even Episerver (Optimizely) is amazed by our planning process!

With Episerver (Optimizely) migrations, customers are learning an entirely new platform so they need a lot more training. That’s why we break these projects out into rounds. Each individual round includes some architecture, some design, implementation, QA, and training.

We've found this development methodology makes migrations a lot less stressful for our clients. They’re constantly learning as we go so they become really familiar with using Episerver (Optimizely), instead of being stuck with a massive brain dump at the very end. It also gives us a chance to check in and determine if we need to adjust something or pull in additional resources. By launch, our clients feel completely comfortable with Episerver (Optimizely) and ready to hit the ground running.

During the planning stage, we’re constantly thinking about where we can leverage automation to speed time-to-market and make your implementation process more efficient.

We understand you may have limited resources so we think about how we can quickly execute your day to day tasks. We leverage data relationships and create global tagging structures so you can have consistency across different data types, for better content management and personalization.

Our training is personalized down to the page and the team member. We’ll hold video training sessions with your team so we can walk them through how to perform their daily tasks with ease in Episerver (Optimizely), and answer any questions they have.

You'll receive copies of those video trainings, along with comprehensive step-by-step documentation illustrated with screenshots of your implementation.