Our team has recently completed the successful migration of all the website content on EdWeb to our new University Website Publishing Platform, EdWeb 2. This is one of the last activities included in a 5-year programme of work which aimed to introduce this new, flexible platform and, more importantly, transition to new, agile, effective and cost-saving ways of working. It will help us continue to fulfil our ongoing commitment to support and benefit our devolved web publishing community to achieve their goal of global engagement with their audiences.

This a journey that started back in 2019 following a decision to review the performance and risks related to the University Web Estate after the previous migration to EdWeb 1. A programme of work was kicked off, with a purpose to identify the web estate areas requiring more attention and kick off projects and initiatives to improve them, led by the new role of Head of Web Strategy, in close collaboration with our team, Website & Communications.

A new vision and strategy for web – Blog post, May 2017

The result of this work was the publication of the University’s Web Strategy in 2018, which has prioritised work under four streams: common voices, user alignment, personalised experiences and influential voices and set a vision which echoed  the University ambition to deliver impact and recognises the need to deliver consistent user experiences across our online offering.

We deliver value online by working together to create a consistently excellent user experience for our global and local audiences

Having reviewed this strategy regularly, I can say that a lot of its ethos and priorities still resonate to this day and acts as a guiding principle alongside other key University Strategies, such as Strategy 2030 and the University Digital Strategy.

University Web Strategy 2018 – Summary and link to the full document of the Web Strategy.

Building the right platform

One of the triggers for this migration programme to EdWeb 2 was the impending “End of Life” for our underlying technology, Drupal 7. We needed to replace our platform, EdWeb 1, with a new one, but what should that look like? One of our key objectives was to use our and our users’ experiences, keeping as many of the positives and successes as we could, while introducing service elements that would give us the highest amount of flexibility, opportunities for improvement, and extensive capabilities for our very large web publishing community.

During the development of EdWeb 1, our teams had heavily customised Drupal 7. Even though this resulted in important benefits, especially the back-end experience on how website content structure was presented, it significantly affected our capability to improve the platform itself due to the associated complexity. Furthermore, it was very difficult to bring web developers or Drupal agencies up to date quickly and help us accelerate the delivery of new features and improvements.

For these reasons, we made a conscious choice to avoid aiming for a “like-to-like” approach. Instead, we decided to take a few steps back and revisit Drupal at its core, aiming to take full advantage of its open source benefits. This did not only ensure we would stay true to our commitment to open source but prepared us to have the most open options for platform improvement and innovation, either by the regular Drupal’s core and module improvements, or by bringing in experienced Drupal developers and practitioners to help us deliver better value to our users.

Our commitment to open source – Blog post, January 2020

Another core decision was to reach out to the market and seek out an experienced partner with significant and proven Drupal experience. Similarly, we decided to move away from an on-premise to a cloud hosting environment, and make use of modern processes to collaborate, test and deploy across our website estate. Our procurement exercise resulted in the Manifesto Digital Agency and the Pantheon Hosting Platform to be our partners of choice.

New ways of working

A key area we wanted to improve was our own capability of not only manage but improve the platform. To achieve this, we have: 

• Introduced more agile ways of working, including sprints with regular release of improvements in the platform.
• Created a new Web Development Team, and introduced new roles like Senior Drupal Developer and Scrum Master, to better support this work.
• Invested in the training of our team in relevant areas, like agile methodologies, its relation with User Experience, and more technical areas.
• Ensured our partners took time to transfer their knowledge with our team.

In terms of how the new platform and service would be provided, we took the decision to move to a different approach for our website estate. Moving away from a traditional, monolithic website to a modular configuration would allow us to have a more secure, better managed web estate, allowing the introducing of different ways to use the central service. 

One core aim, which is now close to being a reality, is to not only be offering a single website package of default editorial capabilities for all, but to have the ability for local teams, e.g. in Schools, to be able to customise this core package according to their own needs and serve their, more sophisticated, needs.

The road to the new University Website platform and services – Blog post, January 2020

A migration is about managing change

Anyone who has led, was involved or affected by a migration to a new platform, especially in an organisation as large as our University, will know how challenging and painful this can be at times. And the migration of website content from EdWeb 1 to EdWeb 2 was, sadly, no different. With the early migrations kicking off as early as 2022, we already had an idea of how much more work we needed to do with the platform to get it in the right shape and size to ensure that all websites, including the critical areas of the University homepage, centrally-managed and School content, could find their appropriate home in EdWeb 2.

There are many stories to tell, and hopefully many blog posts to publish, in the near future, and here is a summary of the efforts and achievements of the web migration team as they persevered through the challenges to a successful end:

• Ran an extensive engagement programme, ensuring each website Lead Publisher had time to speak to our Migration team and ensure they understood the process, expectations and actions required to migrate their website.
• Developed and offered 3 training courses, both in-person and online: 5 things to get started in EdWeb 2, Lead Publisher training and Effective Digital Content training, training almost 900 colleagues in less than 12 months.
• Running regular drop-in sessions to support colleagues who had more specific questions to their websites.
• Have audited and manually fixed a very large amount of these content pages, ensuring that all critical content is presented as expected.
• Being reactive in the needs to make tweaks and changes to the platform to further support its capabilities, management and presentation of content.
• Introducing an operational decision group, including senior managers, to review the challenges and risks in an ongoing basis, ensure that the project enjoyed the appropriate amount of resource and take decisions to support the completion of the migration in the planned timeline.

It all came down to the morning of December 4th, 2024, when the core team gathered at 7am to finalise the move of our corporate website domain, https://www.ed.ac.uk, to point to the new University homepage. The team had done extensive preparations, having documented and tested the process, ensuring colleagues from other teams and our hosting provider were all available to support where needed.

The expectation was for an 1-2 hour outage of the University homepage, and an “at risk” period for the rest of the day. It was all completed in 90 seconds, a testament of the preparation and effort of the team to ensure the impact didn’t last longer than needed. That action completed a migration of:

• 160 websites.
• Approx. 75,000 content pages, reducing by almost 50% the total number of pages stored in EdWeb 1.
• 40,000 documents and more than 90,000 image files.

This has been a people’s success

This has been a massive change programme of work, which has only been possible due to the effort, collaboration, skills, time and emotional investment a lot of people have put over all the time of running these programme of work. So, in alphabetical order, a big thank you all of the project team members, over the years:

Adrian, Aileen, Altu, Andy, Anita, Anita, Anna, Anthony, Ari, Arthur, Billy, Bose (Rhea), Bruce, Callum, Catherine, Charlie, Colan, Colin, Connor, Duncan, Ellen, Ellen, Emma, Eniola, Fiona, Gillian, Gu (Star), Jen, Jo, John, John, Jon, Julie, Katie, Krithika, Li Ren, Lukasz, Margo, Mark, Martin, Mel, Nick, Nick, Paula, Paula, Peter, Ryan, Samad, Satu, Sonia, Sheri, Shivani, Socrates, Sundus, Tess, Tim, Zak.

And a special thank you to the 200+ lead publishers, editors, key stakeholders and project board members. We recognise all their efforts to help make this project a success, and thank them for their time, endurance, feedback, guidance and comments that will make our new service even better.

What’s next?

As we wrap up the work to introduce and migrate all the website content in EdWeb 2, it’s a great time to reflect.

Has this programme taken a significant amount of time? Yes. Was it challenging at times? Yes. Did it worth it? Yes, and time will prove this.

The benefits of these new approaches have already started to show. Our team is ready to welcome 3 School websites, which haven’t been using EdWeb 1 core before, by early 2025. This will take the count up to 17 out of 21 schools in the University to be using the centrally managed University Website platform, some of which will be using the new “locally managed” option. I hope to be able to share more about this new exciting way to use our service very soon. 

In parallel, our collaboration with the Prospective Student Web Content team, will result in the new University Degree Finder to be using the same core codebase from EdWeb 2. This team will, like Schools, be able to extend and manage locally the prospective student experience, while enjoying the benefits and peace of mind of a centrally managed service. 

New University Degree Finder updates – Blog posts from the Prospective Web Content team.

More importantly, we will be taking time to gather, organise and reflect on all the learnings, challenges, outputs and outcomes of the web migration project to include in a service roadmap, and prioritise ensuring we deliver value back to our users. We will aim to do this openly, and in close collaboration with our user group and key stakeholders.

An early indication of our ambition is that we will kick off a project to understand the role of profiles, and have engaged with an external agency to understand how we can incorporate Artificial Intelligence features in EdWeb 2 to best support our website content editors. This project will not only deliver valuable insight but will act as a kickstart for a closer collaboration with the User Experience service in this new era.

The Role of Profiles – Project’s website

What’s more, to improve our website governance, and address the proliferation of content, we will introduce a new process to assess new EdWeb 2 website requests. 

Revisiting our approach for new websites – Blog post, November 2024.

Even though we have just finished our web migration, this is just the beginning. So, watch this space…