I currently have the task of reorganizing and restructuring our ILIAS-Testinstance, which was abused as a productive system for a while now and needs to be rebuilt in a more professional way. Therefore, I voted for a migration to a completely new set of systems. The old testinstance is currently running 4.0.0, while the new instance will (of course) run the current stable release (4.2.3 at the time of writing).

As there is a lot of content in the old system, I would like to migrate it from the old system to the new system and into one category called "archive". That way, our authors may move their data into the new organization schema in order to balance the load on many shoulders (instead of me having to do this tedious task for all existing content). I tried to use export and import the content, but this does not work between different versions, is only possible for certain elements and currently, no bulk-movement is possible at all. I could update the old Testsystem up to stable, but will still have to move the content into the archive-structure.

The only way I've found so far is:

1. update Test-System to 4.2.3
2. Move data and database to new systems
3. Move the old data tree into an "archive"-category
4. Build new category-tree

This approach has the problem, that I will have to migrate everything within one night, as examns are coming in a month and the system cannot be down for a longer period of time (say a weekend - tops). The other solution would be to let the authors manually migrate from the old to the new system, but that would require a working export/import plugin for the content.

My Questions:

1. Did anyone encounter a similar migration problem yet and can share some information on how it was solved?
2. Is there a better way than the process sketched out above?
3. Is there any way to perform a bulk-export and -import?
4. Does anyone see a problem with the approach (e.g. permission problems)?

Best Regards from Heidelberg,
Lars Kumbier