Helping a (potential) client with a predicament of migrating to Vanilla
I am currently in talks with a company called SysAid Technology. We're the finalists but there's still some issues to address in terms of bringing over their current community to Vanilla. They are an ITSM company with a helpdesk product & and other support tools like a knowledge base.
Their current community is a self-hosted JFORUM installation:
They have help pages that were built-in JFORUM that they don't necessarily want to move to Vanilla. It looks like something custom they did because they had the access to do so given that their forum was an on-prem solution. I've asked my champion for clarifications regarding whether or not these help pages are their own KB product built into JFORUM or if it's own stand alone thing.
Help pages:
They also have something called OnlineAid:
Given that they told me they didn't want to purchase our KB because they have their own, but these pages exist in their JFORUm and are subfolders of the community URL, what could we possibly suggest moving forward?
Let's say they migrate all their forum content to Vanilla but leave these help pages alone, the biggest issue I see is with the URLs and re-directs.
Scenario:
- They migrate to Vanilla all their forum content. After final migration, the URL they change the custom domain to their Vanilla instance to community.sysaid.com.
- I imagine a custom re-director would have to handle the URLs from the forum but would that block the pages that exist in the subfolder /help-page?
- Alternatively, what if they changed the name of the Vanilla instance to community.sysaid.com but ALSO renamed their current page to docs.sysaid.com/help-page. This would involve re-direction and work on their side but I am trying to imagine if that even works.
- Another alternative, they name the vanilla instance to forums.sysaid.com ( I doubt they want to but) and leave community.sysaid.com as it is right now. They block all the forum content or set up re-directs on those URLs but leave the /help-page as is. If they do this, how would it work for re-directs post final migration? I know that if a client changes their URL after a migration they too need to set up a re-direct from say community.sysaid.com to forums.sysaid.com. If they set up that re-direct, would it block access to a page that is community.sysaid.com/help-page?
I think a forum posts is the best for this because I need insight from the migration team as well as Rhys and whoever else knows how this works so that when we have a talk with their technical team we can present some kind of options.
Comments
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ok... so if they want:
- to move their community/forum over to us
- leave some help pages where they are
- the help pages are currently (for example): https://forum.sysaid.com/helppage
- the forum is currently (for example): https://forum.sysaid.com/
In this scenario, you could just move the forum to Vanilla and change the DNS so https://forum.sysaid.com points to their new Vanilla community. Then leave the help pages where they are and set up Vanilla "Route" to point https://forum.sysaid.com/helppage back to the old place (with a new address) . e.g. if you hit /helppage on the Vanilla forum you're sent to https://oldplace.sysaid.com/helppage
You can do this with our Route functionality. e.g.: click here: http://rhys.vanillademo.com/helppage
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Can a subdomain be pointed at 2 different domains? community.sysaid.com point to Vanilla & their underlying URL? Because this idea seems to be predicated on this.
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After some additional conversation today, I realized a couple of things.
These online aid questions appear to also be on the forum. In fact they appear to be an iframe of sorts.
Is this same content as here:
It's more like the content exists on the forum, and then they display in this widget that pops up here:
When you click online help.
So, I think what it comes down to is the content actually exists in the forum already. They're displaying it in this online help module they've built. If we migrate them to Vanilla, my guess is this online help widget will no longer work. They could re-build it using our API but that's definitely a project.
Could they use our embedding functionality to basically place all the posts from the online aid category in their current forum to display the content on an external page they manage i.e this widget window.
All the content that exists in that pop-up for online aid is in their forum category called Online Aid:
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The content page is a frame. i.e. it points to a page on the forum.
a) once they migrate, if they set up 301 redirects they would end up with the equivalent page from Vanilla in the frame.
b) the whole thing is part of the forum. Not just the top level frame, but the header and left nav as well. Splitting the DNS would be a nightmare
This is the frame set page. All those pages pull from the community and a pageid variable is passed.
<frameset rows="80,*" frameborder="0"> <frame name="header" src="help-top.htm?ver=68" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"/> <frameset cols="280,*" border="0"> <frame name="tree" src="help-tree.htm?ver=68" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="auto" frameborder="0"/> <frame name="tree_content" src="https://www.sysaid.com/Sysforums/helpData.page" marginwidth="8" marginheight="0" scrolling="auto" frameborder="0"/> </frameset> </frameset>Basically their help site IS the forum, just arranged a little differently.
On the bright side, they could migrate the forum, then create Knowledge base articles from Discussions........ if they were to move to our knowledgebase.
Another bright point, all of their help content would be available in the forum and searchable, so may be they no longer need a knowledgebase. Everyone searches for stuff these day anyway.
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They don't want to use our KB because apparently they have their own KB product but it's IN their platform i.e their ticketing platform that they sell.
Apparently the issue is that this Online Aid is integrated into their product in various places so they're trying to figure out what to do with it.
If they migrated to Vanilla, all that content in OnlineAid could be pulled from Vanilla to this help page? If they left it as is they could change the DNS to their forum now and simply preserve the online aid section for the sake of this pop-up?
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