Hassle-free CMS migration from Sitecore to Umbraco in a close collab

When this Danish organisation decided to transition their extensive Sitecore 8 CMS solution to Umbraco 13 cloud CMS, they turned to the expertise of the global platform agency Jakala. The objective was to minimise their licence fees – and preferably through a flexible migration without the risk of content freeze.

The challenge was significant: migrate 50,000 content items and 1,000 media items across more than 60 different templates in Sitecore towards document types in Umbraco, all while ensuring data security and integrity.

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Not only did Jakala succeed with the data migration, they also did it in a flexible workflow that gave them early access to real data. That allowed them to begin developing the new setup concurrently with the migration, which significantly accelerated the project timeline and time to market.

A smooth migration in three steps

Jakala designed a three-step data flow that kept the data transformation isolated in a local development environment. This approach ensured no directs access to either the original Sitecore solution or the new Umbraco solution, thus maintaining a high level of security and control.

Enterspeed was chosen to handle the data transformation, definitions, and migration.

Step 1: Creating a data dump

First step was to create a data dump of the original source.

Rather than integrating the original Sitecore with Enterspeed directly, Jakala opted to create a complete data dump of the original source to avoid working in the existing solution that was built by a former provider and therefore largely unfamiliar.

Step 2: Ingesting and transforming data

Enterspeed took over in the second step. We ingested the data from the temporary source to our middle layer layer for content federation, where we transformed all the data from Sitecore data structure with templates and prepared it for Umbraco with document types. The transformed data was then migrated to a temporary Umbraco source.

Step 3: Transferring the data packages

Given the vast extent of data, Jakala and Enterspeed decided to migrate and transform it in bulk.

After transforming and preparing the data for Umbraco, Enterspeed sent the validated data back to Jakala in continuous data packages. This ongoing flow allowed Jakala’s developers to start building the final Umbraco solution immediately, without waiting for the entire data transformation and migration to be completed. This parallel workflow significantly accelerated the project timeline and time to market.

If you're curious to know more, you can read along here to know more about the differences and benefits to Umbraco migrations vs transitions.

A collab, not a delivery

Working with Jakala was never a question of them ordering a data transfer and then just sitting back waiting for Enterspeed to deliver. From day one, the project was always perceived as a collaboration to secure the best result. In practice, we set up a joint Slack channel where both developers and project heads could ask questions and request new compositions, ensuring clear division of responsibilities and seamless communication.

As one Jakala developer wrote:

– I am very happy with the progress and how it’s going! We were able to rewrite some of the code already which is awesome! Being able to work simultaneously is also great because we catch issues sooner and fix them on demand! Great job!

The migration from Sitecore to Umbraco by Jakala and Enterspeed was successful and smooth. Frankly, we’re kind of stoked to have helped Jakala move the client into a new setup with a lot less licence fees and a lot more flexibility.

For more info contact Enterspeed CTO Emil Rasmussen.