Kirk Liemohn is a Principal Software Engineer at ThreeWill. He has spent nearly a decade helping clients transform and migrate their content from one platform to another (typically to Microsoft 365) with a focus on the more complex scenarios. Prior to his transformation focus, Kirk led several key SharePoint integrations at ThreeWill including Jive, Polycom, and Confluence.
| In 2009 ThreeWill worked directly with Jive’s engineering team to create a SharePoint connector for Jive. As our client’s needs changed, ThreeWill began migrating customers from Jive to SharePoint (and subsequently Microsoft 365). As our clients went through these complex platform migrations, we identified repeatable content mapping patterns, as well as the need to support the “modern user experience” in M365. This inspired ThreeWill to create specific tools and processes for cloud migrations. In this blog series, we highlight some of these capabilities. All posts in this series can be found here: Jive Migration Highlights. |
A Long, Long Time Ago
Over the years we have improved our Jive migration capabilities immensely. A long while back we migrated to SharePoint wiki pages and classic discussion lists. Now we primarily migrate to modern SharePoint pages, a document libraries, and event lists.
This post focuses on content migrated to SharePoint pages and how you can now customize the migrated content to use your own page template.
What Are Page Templates?
SharePoint page templates provide an easy way to enforce a common look and feel across pages. A page template can:
- Provide a header image
- Specify the layout and alignment of the header area
- Specify the sections and columns on the page
- Contain web parts in the defined sections and columns
Page Templates are really easy to make as described here.
Why Page Templates?
We migrate most Jive content types to SharePoint pages simply because most Jive content is HTML based and SharePoint pages can render the HTML quite well. For file-based Jive content types (file, photo, video) we migrate the files to SharePoint document libraries. We surface the file in a SharePoint page using a File Viewer web part so that we can also show the description and comments.
Since so many of the content types can use SharePoint pages, it can be quite beneficial to use a template so that they all have a similar look and feel. While each item can be customized once its migrated, you’ll gain efficiency by having a template that gets you 80% of the way there.
What will my content look like in SharePoint?
The example above shows a migrated Jive file content item that used a SharePoint page template. Regarding the numbers within the example:
1. The template defines the title area, including the background image, text alignment, and the option to display the author’s byline. The title, author, and date are sourced from the page metadata, which is migrated for each content item individually.
2. This is the description of the migrated file content item and does not have to be part of the template (our migration can add it on its own). It can use either our Enhanced Text web part, which is from our Employee Experience Optimizers, or the standard Microsoft Text web part. If this were simply HTML content in Jive (collaborative document, blog post, etc.) then the entire body of the content would go into this web part.
3. The File Viewer web part displays the migrated file. It is not part of the template but added during migration.
4. This is our Advanced Page Properties web part, which is also one of our Employee Experience Optimizers. This is similar to the Page Properties web part but looks better and works better with managed metadata which we use for Jive categories and tags (categories are shown in the example above). The template defines the web part, and the content item’s migrated metadata includes the values for the properties.
5. This is a Quick Links web part that was added to the template. This contains links that we want to show on every migrated content page.
In the example above, the template uses a two-column format, but it could have been three columns or just a single column. The web parts that we put on the template are entirely up to you. The Advanced Page Properties web part an option but some of the metadata is harder to find without it.
Conclusion
Using page templates is optional for migration, but it is a good way to enforce consistency, have a standard look and feel for migrated content, and to show additional information such as content metadata to the user. To learn more about how we can help you migrate from Jive to Microsoft 365, check out our Jive migration capabilities page or contact us and ask for a walkthrough of before (Jive) and after (M365) content.
READY TO MIGRATE YOUR JIVE CONTENT? CONTACT THREEWILL TODAY!
