Scope
Website and Systems Upgrade Services
The Situation
Minecraft.net had a 10-year-old platform built upon legacy and custom programming languages, with little automation and capability to expand user engagement. The product and marketing teams were looking to change business operations to take advantage of the functionality offered by the framework of a newer Content Management System (CMS), namely Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). With transitioning to this new platform, Minecraft wanted to achieve a tighter integration with consumers, improve retention, and enhance revenue streams with no impact to business operations.
Minecraft also needed to ensure their technology infrastructure supported AEM with full functionality and scalability. Adding further complexity and risk as they weren’t moving from one CMS to another, instead from Django and Python based website content, leaving legacy images and data to be converted to AEM manually.
Virtuosity Engages
Minecraft stakeholders circulated an RFP to secure the most qualified Adobe Specialists, and Virtuosity won the competitive bid due to proven delivery and execution capabilities, AEM expertise, and a strong reputation of being a preferred partner across other groups within Microsoft.
Virtuosity immediately identified multiple project risks, including unknowns in the legacy Minecraft.net technology platform, limited possibility of automation for the migration, improper mapping of taxonomies and data translations, the need to maintain SEO and supporting URL’s from legacy sites, and the need to retaining existing comments from blogs.
The Virtuosity team took a strategic and methodical approach to help document and address concerns to mitigate risks, pivoted the resourcing model to adapt and flex across all vendors and stakeholders, and established a framework for team success.
Achieving Full Potential
Working with multiple vendors and partners, and fully delivering on all executables, Virtuosity was able to migrate 6,000+ images and videos, over 1000 articles, and multiple terabytes (TBs) of data from AWS S3 and Drupal to AEM. We were also successful in recreating all Minecraft.net pages in AEM, maintaining all external integrations, and launched everything into production with zero (0) downtime or errors. With the focus on quality and execution, the team now delivers ongoing support and enhancements on the AEM platform.