- Published on
Sitecore Tutorial – Migrating content from Sitecore PaaS to Sitecore XMC
- Authors
- Name
- Michal Strzalkowski
- @michalmadethis
With the development of SXA Headless and Sitecore’s move towards composable dxp, many are using this as an opportunity to ditch a lot of legacy code and plan a move to a greenfields instance of 10.3, or down the saas path with an instance of XM Cloud. The question arises as to how we migrate the content that we can reuse (datasources containing blog post copy for example) from our old version while avoiding an upgrade.
Sitecore recently (so recently I can’t find a link) announced an automated XM to XMC content migration tool. At the time of writing this unfortunately supports Sitecore 10.1+ so I will not include it as this post is focused on legacy versions avoiding an upgrade.
Preparing Content For Migration
Content datasources being moved to the ‘New World’ should be cleaned up and consolidated, this is a good opportunity to review this and look to make the changes prior to packaging for the new environment.
While now dated and definitely in its sundown era, the tried and sometimes temperamental Sitecore Package Designer is still a part of the platform and allows us to package our Sitecore 7/8/9 content into a cross-version downloadable zip file.
Converting Legacy Content Zip to Sitecore XMC
Prior to migrating the content on our cleanly provisioned UAT Sitecore 10.3/XMC instance, we should test the content locally and serialise it to Sitecore’s new standard SCS format.
Install a local development instance of Sitecore 10.3 and use the Installation Wizard to migrate the legacy content zip items to the local Sitecore 10.3 database.
Once this has been verified and cleaned up, serialize the content into SCS and commit it to a repository : https://doc.sitecore.com/xp/en/developers/100/developer-tools/sitecore-content-serialization.html
This content is now ready for publishing/validating against a UAT Sitecore 10.3/XMC instance using the Sitecore CLI : https://doc.sitecore.com/xp/en/developers/100/developer-tools/validate-serialized-content-items.html