Overview
The Vanilla Forums Professional Services team offers Knowledge Base migrations for any Vanilla Cloud Customer wishing to import existing KB content into Vanilla. There are three types of migrations:
- Vanilla Forum Category to KB Migration: Perhaps you’ve been a customer of ours for some time, and you’ve been leveraging our Community platform to share Knowledge. You’ve created a compendium of instructional posts under a dedicated category within your existing Vanilla platform, and you now wish to convert these posts into articles under the KB structure.
- External KB Migration to Vanilla KB: You have an existing KB hosted on another platform and you wish to migrate this into your existing Vanilla platform.
- New Client Migration from external forum and KB: You are brand new to Vanilla, and have an existing KB hosted on another platform and you wish to migrate this and get started on Vanilla Knowledge for the first time.
Regardless of your use case, our PS and Knowledge teams are here to build the porter package needed to get you started with KB
Migration Process
- Migration Estimate: Vanilla’s migration developers review the data to be imported, flag any potential issues or concerns and estimate the time and cost needed to complete the project. This allows us to plan the timeline for a migration. We are only able to commit to a timeline once the estimate is finalized.
- SOW: With the estimate completed, a Statement of Work (SOW) will be signed by both parties to agree upon the cost and dates proposed for the migration project.
- Test Migration: Vanilla will first complete a test import of the data.
- Feedback round: After the test migration, you will have a chance to review the data that has been imported and flag any questions or concerns you may have. Your Vanilla Success Team will work with you through this phase and implement any changes that are needed prior to final migration.
- Final Migration: Once all launch blocking feedback has been addressed, a final migration will occur where we will reimport all of your data before go-live.
Considerations
Each platform is a little bit unique, so as we enter the estimate phase for any KB migration, there are a few things to keep in mind. Please review the features below and provide any information where applicable.
Comments:
The Vanilla KB (VKB) is currently not configured to house comments. Any comments or feedback linked to an article being migrated to the VKB will not be migrated
Helpful votes:
We are able to migrate the data related to an articles reputation (i.e. it’s “helpful” score, however, this can be measured differently depending on the platform you are using. For example, is an articles “Helpful” rating based on a “yes/no” input or are does your current platform use likes, or another metric to measure a posts quality? Please provide any information related to your article rating system if it applies to your migration.
Localization:
How many languages do you support in your current Knowledge base? If you plan on migrating translations for your articles, please specify the number of languages that will be support in your Vanilla KB instance.
Roles and Permissions:
We are able to migrate role information; however, we cannot migrate permissions. Each platform manages permissions differently and there may not always be a one-to-on match within the Vanilla Permissions framework. Once we’ve imported the user roles, you are able to configure your permissions in Vanilla.
iFrames and Embedded Content
Does your existing KB content include embedded content? For example YouTube videos related to the subject matter. How are these currently housed? Vanilla’s editor automatically embeds images and GIF links, as well as URLs from common sources like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Pinterest. Please specify if there are specific or custom types of embedded content you wish to migrate.
Migration Estimate Checklist
In addition to the above information, each migration estimate requires some basic information and assets be shared with the Vanilla team.
Data Base Info:
The most important part of any migration is the data. We’ll need a complete data base export to complete the estimate. In some cases we may use the API for a migration, if this applies to your use case, please provide your API docs and access token as well.
Please provide:
- A link to your current knowledge base
- Software name
- Software version
- Monthly pageviews (globally)
- Number of articles
- Are there attachments to be migrated?
- If yes: Number of files AND total size
- A complete knowledge base database export including:
- All Knowledges Bases
- All Categories
- All Articles
- All User and User Data
- All data linked to Helpful Votes
- An API access token, if applicable
- API Docs, if applicable
Redirects:
Vanilla’s porter packages can also be configured to work with our Redirector plugin. If you would like us to implement redirects from your old content to the new, please provide example URLs for the following content types (including any variations):
- Knowledge Bases
- Categories
- Articles
- Profiles
- Any other pages you wish to redirect.
Other types of data:
There may be other bits of data you wish to import into Vanilla. If there is anything in particular you are curious about, speak to your account executive or CSM and we will work together to assess your needs.