We are constantly adopting existing Umbraco sites and migrating to the Umbraco cloud or Azure as appropriate.
This is a short article but will be of great benefit to any who tread this path.
On request to adopt another agency's or developer's site, make sure you have requested and received all of the following before you commence.
Now, in an ideal world, a developer would simply connect to the appropriate repo's, clone and build.
All the packages would get reinstalled and when you build the solution it will build and when you run the solution it will run.
Real world experience tells us this is very seldom the case!
Packages are omitted from packages.config, other assets have not been committed to the repository etc.
You are then left with picking through the bones of a solution you know very little about to try and fill the gaps, with a client in the background who doesn't really understand these complications - and why should they?
If you have The Zip archive of the existing developers solution, as currently works on their own local machine, then you should very easily be able to compare all the facets of the site that may be causing you problems; the web.config, missing packages, missing models and any other missing assets that maybe required.
Finally - 1 hour with the incumbent developer, once you're up and running, to walk through the code base is a must. This way we can begin to appreciate the nuances, idiosyncrasies and anomalies that you simply cannot appreciate from a standing start.
Drop us a line if you need any further info, advice or support from our expert Umbraco certified developers