Everyone uses its own system for storing, organizing and sharing knowledge : while some teams work will file shares and chat, others will use a dedicated CMS, or a wiki. While it can be easy to migrate a file and directory structure to another system (eg : migrating from a samba share to a GED), the same doesn't apply when migrating content created within a specific CMS or wiki. In this case, the information usually comes with its own set of metadata that also needs to be migrated and modified to fit in the new system.

In this talk, I will discuss the challenges related to the migration of knowledge from one software to another, with a particular focus on the migration to a wiki-based knowledge management software :

• What are the main points to consider when moving knowledge around ?
• Which metadata should be kept ?
• How to handle the migration of software-specific features (macros, annotations, specific document structures) ?
• Which solutions exists in order to overcome vendor lock-in from proprietary platforms ?

In the last part of this talk, I would like to start the discussion on how open standards could contribute with knowledge migration across different platforms, in order to leverage the challenges mentioned above.