CCH Australia, a Wolters Kluwer business, has successfully published legal information in Australia for almost 40 years and has established itself as one of the leading information providers servicing Accountants, Lawyers & business executives throughout Asia Pacific.
CCH's focus on reliability and quality of the published content was supported by using SGML-structured data early on and since 2001 empolis content management solutions aid to that goal.
CCH Australia is the head office of Wolters Kluwer for the Asia-Pacific region with offices in Sydney, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and China and more than 300 users from all locations using the content management system.
The XML based sigmalink system was implemented at CCH in 2001 growing to a significant size as all the structured content was imported into the system over time. In 2006 a first parallel installation of empolis:Content Lifecycle Suite (e:CLS) was set up to support CCH's Chinese XML content already using all the additional business logic and functionality available for the original sigmalink system. The experiences of using e:CLS, especially the new possibilities with regard to the client functionality and usability confirmed that a migration for the entire system was the desired path.
The amount of data, users and the need to do the migration without major interference with the ongoing production proved to be a challenge. By early 2007 the sigmalink installation had grown to roughly 1.4 million data objects and over 35 million links. Especially the latter contributed to the need of an optimised migration strategy converting the sigmalink-links to the new e:CLS data model. We made use of the WIP / Release logic to convert the majority of the data before the one weekend downtime for the final migration.
Preparation and testing of the migration strategy and timing as well as the verification and testing of the resulting data and system functionality were carried out in cooperation with CCH. After many months of preparations the final migration was successfully completed Sunday, 20 May 2007.
CCH have now been using the e:CLS system successfully for several working days without noteworthy issues and plans for further enhancements of the system are already executed.
