We have completed a review of the Web Publishing Platform (WPP) project and the migration from EdWeb to WPP at the beginning of the year. One of the outcomes of the meeting was that we feel we need to complete some crucial work on the platform and the hosting environment and have made the difficult decision to pause the current migrations for the time being.

Executive summary:

• We plan to pause current migrations for the first quarter of 2023.
  • We’ll be back in touch to propose new dates to lead publishers in late March 2023.
• Some important development work needs completing on the new platform and our cloud hosting before we continue with migration
• Main reasons for the migration pause is to align better with our original vision of building a platform that we can continuously improve.
• We also need to minimise disruption for lead publishers and services

What is happening

Having completed a review of the latter half of 2022 we’ve made a decision to pause our current scheduled migrations and extend the migration schedule up to at least November 2023. We need to do some important development work on our new navigational approach, setting up the University login to work on our platform, web form functionality and to update our support and guidance materials.

Reasons for the change to our migration schedule

There are a number of reasons for this but the main ones are that we want to build a platform that we, as a team, have the skills, knowledge and experience to continuously improve beyond migrating the sites into the platform.

To simultaneously develop the new platform, build and manage the new cloud hosting environment, develop new training and support materials and manage the migration from EdWeb to the new platform is a huge task. While it makes sense to work on these strands in parallel it was making it increasingly difficult to maintain the quality of service we are striving to deliver.

We have over 20 sites migrated and these are working well. However we need to be constantly mindful of the quality of our service over a number of complex areas including the platform, our cloud hosting, our search service and building the foundation that makes future improvements easier.

To do this we need to build on the relationship we have with our publishing community to deliver improvements in an open and honest way.

What is happening next

We’ll need a few weeks to plan out the next few months and then we’ll look to reschedule the migration and contact lead publishers to propose suitable times.  This communication is likely to start towards the end of March 2023.

Part of what we need to achieve with this project is to change and embed the way we gather requirements, develop the platform and update the website design. This is a fundamental change to the way our team works and we need to make time to do this properly in order to create the best foundation going forward. For some functionality we’ll be looking to run some workshops on how we can improve some areas of the websites such as staff profiles.

What to do if there are questions, concerns or complaints?

For any of the following:

•  General questions about Web Publishing Platform or migration
• Concerns about specific issues especially those negatively effecting a School or service 
• Complaints or serious concerns about the project 

Email: website.support@ed.ac.uk