Cancer Research UK

Cancer Research UK is the world’s leading independent organization dedicated to cancer research. With a scientific spend in the hundreds of millions, it supports research into all aspects of cancer through the work of more than 4,500 scientists, doctors, and nurses. It is ranked among the top three biomedical research organizations in the world.

It was important that end-users should be able to search and retrieve relevant information more efficiently by improving the search classification model. When undertaking this, we would need to migrate all of the existing digital assets such as images and other media files. This required all existing metadata to be extracted from the source content often transformed using complex rules and then re-associated to the new Oracle UCM (Stellent) web pages. Finally, CRUK wanted us to generate reports detailing the migration status for each item along with error reports detailing all the exceptions – which would be dealt with using a mop-up process.

The migration presented several significant challenges:

• Complexities of a custom built Web content management system: It was necessary for us to be able to understand and interpret the existing custom built WCMS that stored its content in a database.
• Locating and maintaining existing hierarchy: All the existing page URL forwards and re-directs had to be managed to be in line with site studio customisations and automatic hyperlink resolution.
• Implement a new Taxonomy across all content: It was necessary to apply the new Cancer Research taxonomy across the entirety of the migrated content.
• Supporting previously unsupported file types: Our Discovery phase found several new file types that also needed migrating such as Flash, podcasts and web forms.