Migration

Migration—the act of changing location from one place to another or the seasonal movement of a population from one area to another.

Migration has been a theme in my recent work projects except instead of changing location the migrations were moving content from one authoring tool to another. I worked on projects where I migrated content from Framemaker and WebWorks Publisher to MadCap Flare, from Articulate Studio to Articulate Storyline, and from Microsoft Word to Adobe InDesign. This post is in written in conjunction with migrating my website content from HTML authored in Dreamweaver to the new site authored in WordPress.

In each case of moving content from one authoring tool to another I needed to reevaluate the best way to present the content, choose which content to keep, decide which content could be dropped, and determine what content needed to be reworked to take advantage of new functionality in the new authoring tool. In some cases I was the original content author and in one case I started with existing content written by someone else that needed to be both migrated to a new authoring tool and updated to match the current release of the product.

I had to make those same content-related decisions when migrating the content from the prior version of my website to the new Flink, Inc. website. Incidentally, I also needed to learn the features and functionality of WordPress—which I’m still doing. Future blog postings will be automatically published to the Flink, Inc. website, its FaceBook page, and tweeted. Or at least that is the intent.

Articulate Storyline is another new authoring tool to me so I spent some time getting familiar with it and how it worked before starting that content migration. However it is similar to other eLearning products that Iﾒd used before. It has some features in common with Director and with Authorware and it has a lot of features in common with PowerPoint.

Migrating content isn’t the only journey I’ve made lately. In January, I also migrated to a new computer and made the jump from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1.

Migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 had a different learning journey. I needed to learn the new layout of windows and tools, the new hot keys, and the new ways of doing things. Most importantly I had to quickly learn how to disable Skydrive and how to set up my workflow so that everything is not being written to the cloud—and not using an outlook.com account. To avoid the cloud, I had to do research about how to take the alternative path—not the path that Microsoft intends most users to take. The journey of migrating to the new computer is still ongoing but I'm well on my way.