Migrating from AtoM 2.6 to Heratio: Lessons Learned

After six months of planning and testing, our institution successfully migrated from AtoM 2.6 to Heratio 2.8. Here's what we learned along the way.

Planning Phase

The most important lesson: don't rush the planning. We spent three months testing in a staging environment before touching production. Heratio's plugin architecture meant we could enable features incrementally rather than doing a big-bang migration.

Data Migration

The database schema changes between AtoM 2.6 and Heratio 2.8 were handled automatically by the installer. However, we had custom theme modifications that needed to be ported to the new Bootstrap 5 theme framework. This took about two weeks of developer time.

Results

• Page load times improved by 60% (Laravel query builder vs Propel)
• Staff satisfaction scores increased from 3.2 to 4.5 out of 5
• We enabled 12 additional plugins that weren't available on AtoM 2.6