Dec 27

Written by:
12/27/2011 11:32 AM 

Our first community site to share information and provide forum for our users was launched back in June 2006 and was built using Telligent Community Server –product. License cost for initial purchase was 449 USD.

On 2009 it was already seen that the current CS2007 version was outdated and so there was an request sent to Telligent for an upgrade offer. Now the price was up to 3500 USD and decision was made to still continue with current version.

End of 2011 as new browsers and browser versions have been appearing CS2007 was no longer supporting these, only real supported browser was Internet Explorer which was not really enough for us.

Telligent was totally out of the picture, their price for the upgraded site was now up to 50000 GBP which was totally unacceptable for us!

What we had on our Community Server were Blogs, Forums and Downloads in use. Our own http://www.juvander.fi was running own custom developed ASP.NET pages, plan was to migrate all of these into one product.

So search started to find an replacement product.

IPS Platform

We had a trial run with IPS Platform, but pretty soon figured out that there was no way to do a trial migration in their hosted environment where we were playing with it. Their support was quite helpful but limitations existed so we decided to to abandon this path.

Price for that would have been quite right, features as well but there were another things against it:

1. Built with PHP. As we are working with Microsoft products, this would have been new tool to be added. Not good.
2. Requires MySQL. Same as above, not really wanting to add another unknown product to play with.

Joomla, Simple Machines, Vbulletin

These were also under investigations, but things we learned from IPS Platform already made us to abandon these even sooner. PHP = NoGo, MySQL=NoGo.

Others

There are some site do help you comparing these, such as http://www.forum-software.org/forum-comparator. Very good site to get an overview on what’s out there. But on this site, no Dotnetnuke mentioned (as some other CMS systems missing as well).

So search started to narrow down to products built with ASP.NET and SQLServer and it really narrowed us down to Dotnetnuke. This tool was already in the picture back in 2009 on first round, but at those days it really sounded too complicated compared to CS2007.

Trial migration from CS2007 to Dotnetnuke

When searching around, found some pages mentioning doing migration from Community Server to other products helped a lot:

• This was really helpful and guided us on the right direction on how to migrate blog posts: http://khason.net/dev/how-to-migrate-from-cs2007-to-wordpress-movable-type-or-any-other-blog-engine-supports-xml-rpc-with-c/
• This we used as a base for migrating users and forum posts: http://www.dnndaily.com/tips/itemId/33060/Converting-From-CommunityServer-to-DotNetNuke-Intr

We also had our Download section on CS2007 which we use to distribute downloadable products to our customers, for this part we simply looked how data looked on CS2007 and made totally new conversion tool for it.

First trial was for the forum posts as it was already known that blog posts can be done via XMLRPC. We tried with the sql approach, but it had some issues on creating forums and updating post counts correctly. Sql was written for previous Community Server version so obviously something had changed.

But, posts were there, that was the main thing so.

Second trial was against a blog.

This had some interesting things like

• Handling images, both thumbnails and full images
• References to other parts of the site

This post was the thing that opened our eyes on this. We wrote a simple tool similar to this to

• Retrieve all posts
• Download and fix image references
• Post these fixed blog posts to DNN together with images

Last thing were the downloadable files. This was pretty simple sql approach using custom application using Community Server API to retrieve posts and attachments and post these into DNN Repository module.

User migration was last thing to do and for that we used this as a base to see how users are treated. Again, there were some issues on migrating users using provided SQL statements, so we ended up writing our own migration tool to do same thing which allowed us to do some custom conversions as well.

So everything was set for the full run.

Migration from CS2007 to Dotnetnuke

We started migration this time from users. So all users migrated first to DNN. For this we had to fine tune some parameters for ASPNetSqlMembershipProvider to be the same as on CS2007 (mainly to preserve passwords).

Next was blog posts, migrated one blog at a time. Before migration blogs were created manually.

Forum posts were simple enough, first created manually forum on DNN and then migrate all relevant posts into that.

Downloads were same thing, first create categories for folders from Community Server and then insert all downloads into these.

For quick migration our shopping tool was converted from plain ASP.NET to DNN module, same with some other custom controls.

Lucky for us ASP.NET is working on both new and old so this was a simple thing to do.

Last thing was to create and copy content from www.juvander.fi and everything was there.

Some things that are still unfinished:

• Redirects from old content to new. There are lots of references to old community posts and we are adding those as they are found. Search engines have been busy lately to update their references, CS2007 with tags is creating lots of followed links and now all of those are gone. In the future this will hopefully take some load out from our site as well.
• Fine tuning of skin that was taken into use.
• Tuning DNN environment. Lots of new things to see how they are going, like cache and logging.

Dotnetnuke impressions this far

Migration to DNN was done just before Christmas Eve, which was perfect time for it. Nobody was doing work at that time which gave us more time to verify that everything was running as expected.

There are few things that Community Server had a lot better than DNN, but we are working on these:

• Forum management
• User management, like:
• Site admin gets notification on new user registration, but there seems to be no way to set both sender and receiver address for this e-mail separately nor there is a way to disable this feature. This would help us on not getting not needed e-mails.
• Repository module is not perfect, but already found a way to modify that into right direction
• Overall skinning is a bit difficult to understand first, but we can live with that and educate us on that.

All in all, everything seems now to be working and what is not working we make it to work as soon we find out on it.

Good product so far, well worth the money and time spent on it to get it up and running.