About NorQuest College
NorQuest College is the Edmonton region’s community college serving 19,354 students annually throughout the province in full-time, part-time, distance learning, and regional programs. NorQuest College helps learners with diverse educational backgrounds complete or further their studies through foundational and continuing education programs. Our post-secondary diploma and certificate programs offer career paths in health, community studies, and business.
Background
Kentico's decision to discontinue support for the portal engine in 2023 prompted NorQuest to migrate their web properties to a modern and supported CMS. Following a comprehensive review of CMS options and vendors, NorQuest chose Kentico 13 MVC, partnering with Inorbital to achieve their goals. The project was ambitious as it included their 2000+ page college site as well as 7 other websites the college managed.
We were chosen because of our expertise in working with Kentico and our successful track record of migrating Kentico websites. When migrating from portal to MVC there are a lot of considerations because the coding framework is different. This means the code in many cases must be rewritten and the site redeveloped to work as MVC. To add to the complexity of the work, the project included a lot of custom coded modules and several integrations that would need to be reworked.
Scope
Goals
- Migrate and rebuild the NorQuest portal websites as fully functional MVC websites
- Preserving the current front-end user experience and design
- Increasing flexibility in content creation
- Transfer NorQuest’s website backend onto supported CMS platform
Our Process
Our process for migrating Kentico portal to MVC includes an initial step of collecting and reviewing an inventory of the content for the various websites. Our inventory included all pages, page templates, page types, components, custom tables, forms, custom modules, search indexes, scheduled tasks, code base, and miscellaneous details for each website.
From this point we examined the contents of the inventories and determined a solution for the build. The differences between portal and MVC are substantial so we came up with a plan that allowed us the flexibility to import and use what they currently have but also redevelop the solution so that everything would work as an MCV equivalent. We mapped over what structured data we could and built widgets, page types, custom components and controls to handle the rest.
In many cases, we were able to leverage advances in MVC to streamline form controls, reduce the amount of page types, widgets and make a series of highly functional page types and widgets.
Challenges
Timing and plan:
The challenges of this project involved having a solid and realistic process and workplan. NorQuest were mandated by law to have migrated their websites to Kentico 13 MVC by June 30th 2024. The project started in September of 2023 which gave us 9 months to rebuild, migrate, test and deploy their websites as MVC websites.
Redeveloping content editor controls:
There are notable differences in how content is managed in Kentico Xperience versus the older Kentico platforms. Create an alternative content editing experience that both utilizes all that Kentico Xperience can offer while also keeping the experience familiar and intuitive for content editors.
Our strategy involved taking page templates from the Kentico 12 version and consolidating them into a handful of templates that can be further customized through page level custom fields, widgets and section types.
With the absence of webparts in Kentico Xperience, these were converted to either widgets that content editors can place on pages or they were integrated directly into the templates and can be managed through page level custom fields.
All repeater webparts/widgets in use on the Kentico 12 site were converted or consolidated (where possible) into widgets and these widgets included properties that allowed content editors to further customize how items are displayed.
Repurposing custom API’s:
Norquest College developed custom api (class libraries) that were compatible only with the old versions of the .net framework.Some of these libraries had to be re-purposed in order to get them to work in .NET 8. Others had to be replaced. Large reliance on session state; this had to be adjusted for .NET 8
Content Migration:
| Site | URL | Page Count |
|---|---|---|
| NorQuest College | norquest.ca | 1968+ |
| NQ Board | board.norquest.ca | 1278+ |
| Library | library.norquest.ca | 835+ |
| ESL Rural Routes | albertaroutes.norquest.ca | 658 |
| CALP | norquestadultlearning.ca | 45 |
| ABHCA Bursaries | abhcabursaries.ca | 6 |
Migrating 4000+ pages was also a major challenge for this project. To aid in this process we worked from a snapshot of the content supplied at the onset of the project and then continued with content tracking documentation that took us through the project all the way to the content freeze before deployment. The migrating process was a combination of automated processes and manual efforts. Structured content was mapped to the new site, pages were dynamically generated and manual content editing was used for adding content to newly developed widgets.
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Conclusion
We successfully migrated NorQuest’s websites backend onto supported Kentico 13 MVC CMS platform and launched their site before their June 30th deadline. The website is being well received by college staff and the content administrators are delighted at the ease of use of the now more intuitive, visual and flexible controls for fast and easy content editing that we have developed for their site as Kentico 13 MVC.
The Inorbital team’s expertise and commitment to keeping the project on track was invaluable to our success. There have been some impressive performance enhancements that were realized during the upgrade. However, I think the biggest win is how well this project was managed and executed. I was impressed with how both of our teams managed a challenging project with tight timelines and were able to deliver a terrific final product with very little disruption for the college and our internal clients.
