I have a love/hate relationship with migration projects.
Migrating a customer from one technology to another is always painful. There are always unexpected problems. The best laid plans always go awry.
My advice to clients is always the same: Start early, test everything, keep back-ups and be prepared for the unexpected.
It doesn’t matter how standards-compliant the systems are or how interoperable they are advertised to be. Migration projects are almost always painful. Some forgotten customization always comes back to haunt you. The data never moves from one system to another smoothly.
On the other hand, Migration projects usually mean that a business is serious about change, that the project has meaning. It’s exciting. So, while painful, they are also some of the best projects to work on.
A Personal Twist
I have wanted to move my blog from Posterous to WordPress for over a year but I kept procrasinating.
WordPress was clearly better technology for me. It would provide more flexibility and freedom but Posterous was always good enough to keep me from putting in the time and effort to make the change.
How many businesses face that dilemma on a daily basis?
Given the impending demise of Posterous on the 30th of April, I ran out of time and spent saturday porting my blog.
Actually, I was surprised at how easy it was. I won’t go through all of the details but the most time-consuming part of my day was waiting for the DNS change to resolve so I could finish the migration.
From start to finish, it only took 6 hours. I still can’t believe it. When I started on started on Saturday, I only expected to get the plan in place and to finish the work on another weekend.
I can’t help thinking that enterprise software should aspire to be such ease and simplicity.
