Moving to ZenDesk

Hi All,

We are currently working on migrating our support/customer service systems to Zen Desk.

One of the tasks involved with that move is to migrate the forums on this server from VBulletin to Zen Desk’s forum system. This move should greatly improve the overall user experience but it will introduce some changes. I wanted to share the general approach that we are taking so that people have time to ask questions or point out something that we may be missing.

What will get migrated from these forums.
[ol]
[li]User Emails
[/li][li]Forum Topics
[/li][li]Topic Discussions/Threads
[/li][li]Discussion Attachments (less than 20MB)
[/li][/ol]

What won’t get migrated from the forums.
[ul]
[li]Private Messages
[/li][li]Avatars & Signatures
[/li][li]Passwords
[/li][li]Groups
[/li][li]Search Engine Links - there will be one main redirect from forum.percussion.com to the new support portal.
[/li][li]Forum IA. Several “forums” will be consolidated into a general Q&A forum.
[/li][/ul]

General Approach
[ul]
[li]Migrate users
[/li][li]Migrate one forum at a time using ZenDesk API’s
[/li][li]Lock forums when live and post link to new location.
[/li][li]Send user’s account setup email when ticket system is migrated.
[/li][li]Submit new forum location to search engines
[/li][li]After Google has re-indexed take old forum server down.
[/li][/ul]

This process will take a month or two to complete, and there will be additional communications on NetSuite account migration etc from Customer Success. But I wanted to give the user community time to comment or voice concerns on the move as it relates to this forum before we get too deep into the project.

Feedback welcome.

Thanks

-n