Still surely there’s a middle ground between completely linear migrations and cross-migrations. While migrating content between wikis and blogs does not seem very useful, migration from Segue or WordPress to Drupal might be….

While WordPress is a blogging tool, many people are using it in ways that you would be hard pressed to call a blog. For example see James Morrison’s site on International Political Economy.

Most of the sites created in Segue are not course sites, but sites for resources, depts, areas, e-portfolios, blogs. Some of these could be migrated to an LMS, but many of them might be better re-created in Drupal or WordPress.

With these ideas in mind, Consider:
CT Migration Proposal Diagram

The problem is one of exploding combinations.

For example, assuming that we run one each of a blog, CMS, LMS, and Wiki at a time and migrate to new versions of each every few years, we have one migration step to do at a time. This is sometimes painful, sometimes easy, but is a built-in cost of migrating a system. As well, these migration tools only need to work for the period of migration, not maintained indefinitely.
Linear Migrations Diagram

If we start trying to migrate content between systems or recommend/promise such a thing, then we quickly get ourselves into a situation where we must maintain many migration tools over a long period of time.
Cross-Migrations Diagram
This would be an enormous support and development cost that I imagine would vastly outweigh the benefit to our users.

Were a policy of providing cross-migrations between one or more tracks of applications to be recommended, I think this would require funding and institutional buy-in to support it. If tools happen to exist to migrate between two tracks of platforms, I don’t have a problem installing those tools, but we should not be spending all of our development time writing such tools if there is not a clear institutional benefit.

- Adam