CMS Centralisation and migration

January 2016

Well encapsulated by this post by Tom Stringer, CMS and Hosting platforms lead in my team, my team was responsible for a major migration and consolidation project.

To borrow from Tom's summary, in this project we:

  • streamlined the University's external web hosting arrangements with new contracts and migrations to new cloud infrastructure
  • decomissioned the University's main static web server (which held more than 500 websites, including the top-level domain)
  • developed a new enterprise CMS operating environment and consolidated the bulk of our web presence onto it, including major faculty sites (Law, Arts, Medicine, Science)
  • decommissioned, merged, or redirected more than 400 websites
  • migrated more than 90 sites to new platforms
  • refreshed the University's top-level domain (unimelb.edu.au), stripping out 140+ old first-level subsites and replacing them with just 14 redeveloped sites.
A wall in the office where we listed all the websites we migrated or removed.