Migrating to WebSphere Portal 7: WCM

I am currently working on a project for a customer where we are migrating a very complex portal from WebSphere Portal 6.0.1.3 to 7.0.0.1.  There is quite a bit going which has to be migrated including Personalization rules, JSF portlets, Spring MVC portlets, customized WebSphere caches and shared libraries, customized WebSphere Portal configuration, content nodes, URL mappings, and of course an extensive amount of content.  The approach we chose to take for migrating content turned out to be pretty straight forward.  In this scenario we simply copied the existing production JCR database from the production 6.0.1.3 authoring environment to the new portal 7.0.0.1 development environment and ran a series of configuration tasks to upgrade the JCR.  Once complete, syndicators can then be configured to push content to test, stage, production authoring, and production.  At a high level, here are the key steps:

• Copy the existing 6.0.1.3 JCR database to your new portal 7.0.0.1 development server.
• Inspect your wkplc.properties, wkplc_dbdomain.properties, and wkplc_dbtype.properties files to make sure all the database settings are correct.  NOTE: you must set DbSafeMode=”false” in wkplc_dbtype.properties.  If not, the ConfigEngine tasks run later will not be able to update the database schema.
• Run the following ConfigEngine tasks:

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./ConfigEngine.sh validate-database -DTransferDomainList=jcr
./ConfigEngine.sh  connect-database-jcr-migration
./ConfigEngine.sh   update-wcm-schema

• Restart portal

At this point you should be able to access the authoring portlet and verify all content and components have been successfully migrated.  When you migrate your pages with rendering portlet references, all your content should show up.  One note to remember though is don’t forget to migrate your personalization rules if you are using any personalization.  You can simply export the nodes from your portal 6 environment and import them to portal 7 without changing any rules or running any migration tasks.  Good luck with your migration!