Creating a new CMS, importing content from ASP - Umbraco or Sharepoint?

Question

I'm working on a project to create a CMS, which will entail importing a lot of existing content, most of which is static, but in ASP (so they're not all just pure HTML, there are includes and sometimes other server-side code).

We're considering using Umbraco or Sharepoint (2010) for managing the external content, which currently comprises a few thousand pages. I've read this and I think there are good cases to be made for both sides. However, while I've read about the features of adding and managing content, I have not seen anything regarding the importing of existing content into either. And since we have a lot of content that will have to be imported, the ability of either CMS to facilitate this will be a major factor in the decision.

I'd like to know if anyone has any experience trying to import a lot of content into either Umbraco or Sharepoint, or if you have any idea how I might go about doing that. Is it easy for either? Are there plug-ins I can find, or scripts I can write? Or will I pretty much have to import each existing file manually with either CMS?

If you have experience with Umbraco or Sharepoint and have any ideas about this, I would value your input and/or recommendations.

Answer 1

I cannot speak for SharePoint but I have had to import content from a MS Content Management Server 2002 database into Umbraco.
Umbraco is very extensible and I was able to build a dashboard component that allowed me to do this.
It effectively examined the MSCMS channels and postings and recreated the structure using Umbraco document types. It was very much working at the API level but I would say the learning curve wasn't too steep and Umbraco documentation has come on leaps and bounds over the last two years.
There is also the possiblity that someone has already written a package to do what you need to do so it is worth checking out the community at http://our.umbraco.org.

Answer 2

Are you just using SharePoint as a CMS? IMHO whilst SharePoint can be used as a CMS that is not where its real strengths lie - its more suited to Intranet/Portals/Collaboration tools.

I am sure someone will be on in a minute with links to SharePoint showcase sites but the disadvantages :-

• Its expensive (even with 'free' WSS version you need Internet connector license) + windows licenses.
• The markup can be fairly 'heavy' and difficult to customise (tables galore in 2007 and javascript files measured in hundreds of kb)
• Questionable cross browser functionality in 2007
• Relatively poor 'website' features e.g. blogging engine as compared to some dedicated CMS's

Basically - if all you are after is a CMS then perhaps there are better options?

(I should say that I think that in an Intranet/Portal setting SharePoint is brilliant, frustrating sometimes for sure, but brilliant).

Answer 3

I haven't done any Sharepoint but I've imported content into Umbraco and found it very flexible. I imported data from a database and created doctypes and custom datatypes in Umbraco then created and populated umbraco documents with code like this:

using umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web;

...
DocumentType dt = DocumentType.GetByAlias("myDoc");
Document doc = Document.MakeNew(name, dt, user, parentId);
doc.getProperty("whatever").Value = getWhateverXML();
doc.Save();

Answer 4

Hi I don't know Sharepoint but I build a package for Umbraco which can help you importing data from other systems into Umbraco. In the way you dewscribe it you could export your site to a file format using the HTML Agility pack and then use my tool www.cmsimport.com to import the data into Umbraco.

Hope this helps, Richard