FarCry to Sharepoint Complete As-Is Migration. Possible?

support
1

Hello team,

I would like to know whether it is possible to migrate a FarCry system As-Is to a Sharepoint CMS? Few questions that I arrived at:

  1. Is it complex?
  2. Feasible?
  3. Can it be done by just migrating the DB? Will this be supported?
  4. Cold Fusion and ASP .NET, will there be compatibility issues?
  5. Apache and IIS webserver, again any issues?
  6. Any other issues noted?

Please let me know your thoughts. Experts opinion appreciated.

Thanks
Paul

2

Are you looking at migrating the content into Sharepoint CMS or alternatively looking at hosting the existing FarCry installation on the same server as Sharepoint CMS?

What stack are you currently running on? ie. OS, CF engine, web server, version of FarCry, and database

3

Hello Geoff,

Thanks for writing back so quickly. Appreciate that.

Our requirement is to migrate from the current CMS FarCry to Sharepoint 2013. We would intend to do the following:

  •      Migrate existing design, functions and content as-is from FarCry to SharePoint 2013, including

o Solution architecture, hosting configuration, development processes (Agile Scrum preferred) and migration / development

Well, I am not a FarCry expert and I am looking for some initial information to conclude whether migration is actually possible. I cannot commit on any commercial support request, but I would prefer to at a later stage depending upon the agreement with my client.

Could you give me some further inputs on the aspects that need to be considered important while performing the migration so that there is less impact on performance and business continuity? Few questions from me:

  1.   Will it be enough to just perform a DB level migration (as both supports MSSQL) via some migration scripts to achieve complete migration?

  2.   Will there be any performance risks and also risks related to any features that are offered get vanished after migration?

  3.   Cold Fusion and ASP .NET, will there be compatibility issues?

  4.   Apache and IIS webserver, again any issues? Or does FarCry support IIS as well?

  5.   Any further considerations before migration?

Thanks in advance for your help.

5

You will need to answer the earlier question around co-existence or migration. These are mutually exclusive choices.

6

We’re looking at migrating the content to a new system.

I do not have the stack details yet. Lets assume it to be Windows OS, running on IIS, farcry v4 and mssql db.

7

If its a straight migration you will need to identify any functionality that your FarCry installation has that is not present in Sharepoint 2013. If it’s a vanilla FarCry with CMS plugin installation then you are likely looking at News, Events and a nested hierarchy of web page content.

Given the open nature of the FarCry database schema I suspect you can orchestrate a the data extraction and push it into Sharepoint 2013 through an available API – or worse case scenario directly into the Sharepoint 2013 database schema. What that is likely to cost is anyone’s guess – you would need to put aside some development time to do a “spike” and assess the likely resource cost.

Sounds like that would be your only option.

Performance risk? Only if Sharepoint 2013 performs less well than FarCry. Seeing as its a one-way migration I suspect it is not something that can be overcome in any event.

Losing features? FarCry is a platform that is ideal for building bespoke or tailor made web applications. Depending on your installation there may well be functionality that does not translate to Sharepoint 2013. This is not really a FarCry specific issue.

Seeing as your talking about a complete migration away from the platform there won’t be any specific technology conflicts as the “old” technology will no longer exist :wink:

Hope that helps!

8

Hello Geoff,

Thanks for the details. I wanted to check on the technology side, to understand whether there will be any issues with the formats, types of the data that gets migrated.

Paul

9

Hi Paul,

Out of interest, why are you doing this? As an organisation that runs multiple SharePoint environments, including a large 2013 environment, as well as FarCry 6 and FarCry 7, I couldn’t imagine willingly moving from FarCry to SharePoint. The only way we would ever consider this is if we had no ColdFusion/Railo/Lucee and FarCry skilled staff (or no money to pay contractors) but did have very skilled SharePoint experts already employed. On that note we do have SharePoint experts on staff already and we still won’t use SharePoint for any important sites.

It’s hard to say without knowing what size site you want to move but unless you have skilled SharePoint staff (backend/infrastructure experts not frontend) I think you’re going to find it difficult or cumbersome to migrate from any CMS platform to SharePoint. Hell, it was near impossible to migrate an old SharePoint environment to two versions up (to 2010 I think). Even Microsoft said it couldn’t be done without data loss.

Best of luck Paul.

Regards
Mark

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