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Does this illustration strike a chord? Well it might well have been a picture of your Webmaster when he arrived home from work on a Tuesday night late in January 2012 and opened his Webmaster e-mail in-box. In honesty the image did not change much over the next three months.

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And what had caused this alarm we hear you ask. Before explaining this we need to go back in time. We had started building the replacement Clan website late in 2008. The key decisions were what software to use to build the site and where to host it. We eventually decided to use a solution offered by Microsoft called Office Live Small Business. One of the main reasons for this choice was the expectation that Microsoft would be a reliable provider. It also helped that the software element of the package was free of charge.

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The new site was launched with a limited number of pages in July 2009 and over time we continued to refine it adding new options, pages and photographs. By the start of 2012 we had several hundred pages and nearly one thousand photographs.

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So what did that e-mail in January say? Well it told us that Microsoft were withdrawing the Office Live solution and offering a replacement called Office 365. If we decided to sign up for the new package then we would have until 30th April to migrate our website; if we did not then we would lose the site on 30th March. Oh! And after a free introductory period we would have to pay a monthly fee.

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In an ideal world we would have liked to consider our options in detail. However it soon became apparent that we simply did not have the time to find an alternative supplier, learn a new software package and then rebuild the whole website. It was clear that, like it or not, we had to move to the new Microsoft offering.

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The good news, from the Clan’s point of view, was that the Webmaster was retiring during the first week in February and could make some time available. Plans for a relaxing start to retirement sadly had to be put on hold.

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And so the fun began! We signed up for Office 365 and started to read the so-called “Self Transition Guide”, which was supposed to describe how to migrate the website from the old platform to the new. We soon realised that this was not going to be a conventional migration process. We would basically be required to build a new website to run alongside the old one. On completion the Website Address would be moved from the old site to the new and the old site deleted. The task would involve rebuilding and linking all the site pages and uploading all the photographs one at a time.

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At this stage we did consider trying to improve the site during the rebuild process. However we quickly came to the conclusion that time would not permit this and that the realistic approach was to build a mirror image of the Office Live site. A very good decision!

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And so it was that your Webmaster spent the first eighty days of his retirement working long hours completely rebuilding the Clan MacThomas website. The job was completed and the new site put live just days before the 30th April deadline.
To say that we, like many others across the world, are unhappy with the way that we have been treated by Microsoft would be an understatement.  It turned out that the Self Transition Guide was incorrect and support from the Microsoft helpdesk poor. Moreover the new software does not even include all the features of the old – hence the use of different fonts around the site.

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We must this opportunity to thank members Jan Rogers in the USA and Grahame Thom in Australia who kindly spent many hours proof reading the hundreds of pages on the new site and checking that all the links work correctly. We should the also pay tribute to the gentleman in Vietnam who constructed a website to help a worldwide community of struggling webmasters with the migration process.
Since the site went live we have spent time catching up on a backlog of material that we were not able to add during the rebuild period.

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At the request of the Society Council we have also added Google Analytics to the site. This enables us to analyse who, by country or region, has visited which pages on the site. Just out of interest, since we put this feature live at the beginning of June we have had visits from people in 28 different countries. Some of the more unexpected ones are Bolivia, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Russia, Romania, Mexico and Macau.

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The website is a vital tool for communication with Society members across the world. We encourage you all to visit the site regularly and use the “What is New?” page to find out what has been added or changed. Your webmaster is always delighted to receive your comments and suggestions by e-mail to:
webmaster@clanmacthomas.com.

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