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Migration path from Classic StoryMaps

SteveBeste

I see that eventually I will have to migrate my Classic StoryMaps story to the new ArcGis StoryMaps. By then I suppose that Esri will have implemented all the old features I use into the new product. Come the day, I'll check, but I expect no problems. What DOES worry me is the URL.

At this point, I have thousands of people who have bookmarked the URL of my story. Those bookmarks are the most valuable things I have. The story itself I could always recreate if necessary. But if the URL changes, then years of my work publicizing the site and getting people to link to it will be lost. So:

-->Will Esri provide a migration path that will preserve the URL of my story? Please, please yes.

-Steve Beste

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SteveBeste

Ellen,

I do appreciate your interest in the problem. And from your description, you've seen it before. Yes, I think we developers (I speak as one) are always more interested in the shiny new thing than in supporting the legacy users. That old stuff is such a drag!

To your specific suggestion that Esri give StoryMap authors a way to customize the URL of their story: I don't think that will solve the problem. At the end of the day, users will bookmark what they see, and that will be Esri's storymap URL, not some bit.ly URL or equivalent that the users went through on the way to the storymap. Heck, I've already created that kind of thing with my redirect site NoVaDogParks.com. That's what I publicize. But that's not what my users bookmark. They bookmark what they see, Esri's URL for the storymap: https://sbeste.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=90abfd6d1ff741c09ec446a559362b34.

In the end, I think the only fix is to persuade Esri to provide redirects from that kind of URL to the URL they assign to the migrated story. Given the amount of customer value that they're about to destroy, I'd think that their management would support this even if the developers don't want to be bothered.

EllenNodwell_IntegraShare

Hi Steve -

I have looked again at the issues you face. As an aside, I think that potentially, the ArcGIS Online Assistant link that I sent may have been an earlier iteration of Geojobe's applications that do the same thing - not sure. It does still have the function of setting URLs to another URL. I am looking at it right now.

StoryMaps seem to present a different situation.

One thing is that StoryMaps start off in a different root than the rest of our AGOL content. It appears that if we try to move the StoryMaps we make off that root, to say our own site's root on AGOL - things break.

I can't look at a Portal right now to determine if StoryMaps in Portal come from the internal source our how that looks since it is inside a firewall vs. being outside the firewall. I suspect that all of these are situated in the storymaps folder up there - but, I'm not looking at the information architecture paths on this except through the browser's developer tools.

Of course when we are building dynamic content, the user-experience full life-cycle is often time not thought about in our fast-paced development scenarios - we find that often people just start developing maps and apps without any sort of overall design plan or thought about forward life-cycle of maintaining over a long period of time. It seems that the focus is more about quick delivery of the application and what the needs are for it - and sometimes the "hurry up" factor overrides all other aspects.

Migration paths often seem to be afterthoughts. At this point in my decades long career, I could write an entire book about GIS migrations and management of change! Yet here we are and we just do what it takes to keep our users' needs fulfilled, if we can.

A suggestion of on we might, for the future, is to put up in ArcGIS Ideas a request to make maintaining these StoryMaps more sustainable, by enabling content publishers/authors to utilize a custom URL (or rename a URL), as you would a web page or post as we are able to do with web content in other platforms.

I'm not the expert on this - but, through maintaining several websites that use different platforms, most have this capability.

But, one simple idea might be to request the ability to customize our URLs so that they make more sense to our end users and we can manage moving to the newest versions with less headaches and impact to them, so that they can continue receiving good uninterrupted service from their apps. Any change we can reduce is of benefit to them in doing their daily work, which often does not involve managing IT stuff.

SteveBeste

I read the Admin Tools material on the Geojobe website and watched their video under the link "Update Web map Service URLs and Source URLs". It sounds like a great tool for migrating material from one server to another. But I saw nothing that suggested that it would redirect browser queries from an old URL to a new one. In any case, I'm using Esri's server, not my own, so I have no control over the URL for my Story Map, neither the current URL nor the future one.

Net: I still have the original problem.

JonathanLevy_Harbors

Geojobe might work.

https://apps.geopowered.com/admin-tools/basic/#

EllenNodwell_IntegraShare

Probably best for you to look at the tool and the utilities to see if it will work for you. If you go to that link I posted for AGOL Assistant, and sign into your portal(s) (AGOL or Enterprise Portals) you can see if any of the utilities/functions do what you need for them to do. Before you even log in read the landing page of AGOL Assistant. Anyhow, good luck and hope it works for you.

SteveBeste

Ellen,

I'm still not clear that what you're doing will solve my problem. That is, I hava a StoryMap with a URL of xyz. When I migrate to the new StoryMap version, I want the new one to also have the same URL of xyz. My problem isn't the migration itself, but the preservation of the URL since that's what my customers have bookmarked. Are you saying that your migration method will preserve the URL?

EllenNodwell_IntegraShare

Hi @SteveBeste - if you want to experiment here is the link: ArcGIS Online Assistant (esri.com) It's pretty straightforward to understand. You must have admin rights on the sites that you want to move content from A to B. There are some other utilities, as well. Check it out. It was suggested to me by some people years ago, and it still seems to function OK. I signed in yesterday to check to see if I could still use it. Let us know what you figure out, whether it works for you in your situation.

SteveBeste

Ellen,

I'm not familiar with ArcGIS Online Assistant. I look forward to hearing the results of your experiment.

EllenNodwell_IntegraShare

Just an innocent question here: would ArcGIS Online Assistant help in this case or no? I haven't tested this, but it does have some of that functionality... I may try it and see what happens... In the past I had used it to lift and shift content from one Portal (dev) to another (prod). It's one of those "rare find" tools that someone told me about and I have used it quite a bit for managing content between sites. I will update this post once I see if that might work...

SteveBeste

Jay,

I'm gld to hear that someone else has this problem. I think that at the end of the day, Esri will have to get involved. I tried to solve this by setting up my own website, NoVaDogParks.com, which does nothing but redirect to the StoryMap on Esri. It's a shell. I then publicized my URL, the idea being that I could keep it constant even if the Esri URL changed. It hasn't worked, though. People bookmark what they see and like, which is the Esri URL. Indeed, since my site immediately redirects, people can't bookmark it. So that kind of shell website is not the solution.

Regards, Steve

JayJohnsonWashoeCounty

This issue of managing URLs is a real pain point. Aside from the use case being discussed here (migration from one generation of app to the next), the ability to easily "swap out" one version of a StoryMap, Dashboard, WAB app, etc. for another updated/re-designed one without inconveniencing the end-user is something we struggle with. Users are going to bookmark our content and then expect it to be there FOREVER. At a high level, we need some workable strategy for managing URLs that can handle re-direction. It doesn't even have to necessarily be an ESRI-built solution, but it is a real issue that we all face.

I've used the "put a note on the old app" approach, but that is not an elegant solution.

SteveBeste

Owen,

While I appreciate the quick reply, I think your proposed solution will still cost me most of my customers. Consider:

You expect the user to DO something - change their bookmark or a link on their website.
While at the same time you remove most of their incentive to do so. After all, as long as the classic story is up, why would they bother linking through to some other version of the same information? They'll get their answer from the classic site and procrastinate on doing anything else. Wouldn't you? And then one day it'll be gone.

Technically, I'm sure you can do redirects if enough of your customers want it. As a developer, you're in love with the new thing and want to be shut of the old. As a developer myself, I understand that. But please understand that you're proposing to destroy a chunk of Esri's value to your customers. Putting my business manager's hat on, that seems unwise. Please consider adding redirects to your development list.

Thanks,

Steve

OEvans

@SteveBeste -- It is not possible for us to provide redirects from individual classic story maps to updated stories created with ArcGIS StoryMaps. However, your classic story will continue to work for several years.

When and if you choose to recreate the story with the latest ArcGIS StoryMaps, you can easily provide a note on your classic story that will link your readers to the updated version.

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