Business

Ins and Outs of Migration to AEM: Better Be Safe Than Sorry

Exadel Digital Experience Team

May 22, 2023

#AEM #Digital Experience #Digital Marketing Technology

CMS platforms help you cut down on development time and allow you enough creative freedom while providing a solid base for common functionality. However, you can get to a point in the CMS lifecycle where you have to migrate to another CMS to boost your online presence and amplify your business efforts while winning over customers and increasing your revenue.

Adobe Experience Manager, or AEM for short, encourages enterprise-level businesses to consider migration to AEM and use other Adobe products alongside the CMS. Companies such as Coca-Cola, HP, Philips, General Motors, and others have had remarkable success with AEM implementation, adding to the popularity of the platform.

If you’re exploring AEM migration, this article will shed light on whether you should consider the move and how you can switch to AEM without causing any harm to your current online presence.

When is AEM Migration Necessary?

You may want to consider CMS migration to AEM if your current platform is lagging behind in ease of management, back-end flexibility, database management, or overall CMS compatibility with up-to-date search engine algorithms.

How Can Migration to AEM Help?

The idea of AEM migration is not that of hype, but rather a necessity backed up by evidence and strategy. AEM’s definitive feature is personalization and an omnichannel approach to content distribution. They say ‘Publish once, publish everywhere’. Let’s walk through the AEM perks that make it the CMS of choice when yours is struggling.

Benefits of Adobe Experience Manager Migration

Better Functionality

You can consider migration to AEM if you want to extend or improve the functionality of your website. AEM lets you create custom digital experiences which provide stellar content workflows, digital asset management as well as social and multi-channel collaboration.

Better Efficiency

You can also look into migration to AEM to overcome a lack of web efficiency. You may want a better server and CMS technical metrics that will improve your website performance. With AEM, you can optimize Adobe AEM implementation to reach optimal web performance.

Better UX

You may be prompted to move to AEM because of poor user experience. Migration to AEM can help you establish a consummate user experience to increase page views and conversions.

Better Management

AEM can help you manage mobile applications, mobile websites, eCommerce, and AEM marketing campaigns — all in one place.

Better Traffic and Online Visibility

With the migration to AEM done correctly, your site can leverage better search engine visibility and a surge in traffic. Powered by Adobe Sensei, AEM has a unique visual search feature to help you search similar assets in the digital asset manager. AEM as a cloud service is updated regularly without any downtime. It helps by providing a seamless experience to the user and also helps to deliver content efficiently.

Another great advantage of this software product for content management is that it’s part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. This means that content developers can easily use tools like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Target to increase the overall content performance and monitor this performance in real time. Additionally, AEM also houses a ‘Site’ module to help marketers and designers easily manage multiple websites simultaneously from one place.

Better Look and Feel of the Brand

Sometimes, businesses go for migration to AEM to present their brand in a new light and create some hype around it. AEM is a tool that can reinvent your brand thanks to its diversified capabilities which influence how site visitors see content and web pages.

An Instrumental Analysis to Ace Migration to AEM

Before you commence, it’s essential to conduct a thorough analysis of how and what you’ll be migrating to AEM.

Do a Content Audit

A content audit is just as important as the move. You should catalog all the site’s content and assets such as copy, images, videos, posts, and the like. Content should be optimized for both web and mobile applications and include CSS, JS, HTML files, binary objects, and anything else of importance.

By linking the content to where it resides on your site, you’ll be able to execute AEM migration without losing any details. Once you’ve cataloged all the assets, you can decide what goes to the new CMS.

Since AEM is hierarchical, you need to ensure that the legacy system’s content is organized into a hierarchy before moving it to AEM. Consider anything suited for content hierarchy ranging from frequency of content updates, logical bucketing on the basis of page types or creation date, and content interdependence between pages (dynamic content). Once you have finalized the content structure, you can proceed with migration to AEM.

Ensure a Sound SEO and URL Strategy

In order to move all the assets, you have to follow an SEO strategy and optimize content and URLs so that they are easily found across the site and in search engines. As far as URLs are concerned, you should indicate redirects and page-not-found errors.

Establish Strong Designer-Developer Collaboration

AEM migration requires designers and developers to collaborate closely. AEM website components, structure, features, and the overall success highly depend on how well designers communicate the design and how effectively AEM developers translate that design into code.

Leverage the ETL Cycle

The ETL cycle stands for Extraction-Transformation-Load and helps AEM specialists to migrate content from one system to another. Content gets extracted, transformed to an appropriate format for further analysis, and later loaded to the new CMS. In an AEM environment, ETL is built up in the following way:

  • Extraction: Legacy systems export content to flat file structures such as CSV, XML, and the like. That is to put all content into one file format for further processing.
  • Transformation: Consequently, content gets converted to the destination format. Rewriting links, mapping tags, removing outdated or unwanted information, and special character handling and encoding are all legitimate procedures to ensure a smooth migration.
  • Load: The final step is to load content to AEM. You can do it by using Sling Post Servlet, Content Loader in CRX, Package Manager or any other tool of your choice.

AEM Migration Checklist

Here’s a rundown of action items for your Adobe Experience Manager migration:

  1. Define your migration goals
  2. Read and understand the technical requirements for migrating from your CMS to AEM
  3. Note all the CMS-specific plugins that you use and the ones affecting the content, in order to find alternatives in AEM
  4. Review custom styling and content annotation to understand where customization is needed in AEM
  5. Think through the migration plan for the comments associated with the posts
  6. Consider banner spaces that may or may not be migrated
  7. Keep in mind original content HTML tags so that you can recreate them in AEM
  8. Keep track of the categories and tags associated with the content. You will need to recreate these in the console in AEM
  9. Consider the table of contents when migrating a series of posts to keep things in order
  10. Keep all user data if there are user accounts so that you can continue maintaining them in AEM
  11. The essence of migration to AEM lies in the way it’s done. And that’s what we’re focusing on all along.

Migrate your CMS to AEM. We can map and execute the move with precision and transparency.

Learn More

AEM Migration: Manual or Automated?

You can opt for manual or automated migration to AEM once you’ve evaluated the efficiency and risks of each method.

Automated migration to AEM can be a useful tool to save time and effort when moving content and assets from a legacy system to AEM. However, it’s important to consider the complexity of the migration, the size of the content and assets, and the level of customization required in the migration process.

Automated AEM migration may be suitable when the points listed below perfectly align:

  • There is a large amount of content and assets to migrate, making manual migration impractical or time-consuming.
  • The migration is relatively simple and straightforward, with minimal customization required.
  • The legacy system has a well-documented and standardized structure that can be easily mapped to AEM.
  • The content and assets in the legacy system are compatible with AEM’s structure and format.
  • The cost of manual migration outweighs the cost of automated migration.

It’s important to note that automated migration to AEM may not always be the best solution, particularly if the migration requires significant customization or if there are compatibility issues between the legacy system and AEM. In such cases, it may be necessary to perform a manual AEM migration. You should consider manual migration whenever the AEM migration process requires a higher level of customization, involves complex content structures or requires a more hands-on approach to ensure the quality of the migrated content.

Some scenarios where manual Adobe Experience Manager migration may be a better option include cases where:

  • The migration involves custom content structures or workflows that require manual mapping to AEM’s structure
  • The legacy system contains a significant amount of unstructured or irregular content that requires manual transformation
  • The content in the legacy system is incompatible with AEM’s format or requires significant modification to fit within AEM’s structure
  • The content requires significant optimization or enrichment before being migrated to AEM
  • The migration process requires data cleansing or consolidation, which cannot be done through automation
  • The content in the legacy system has a high value or importance and requires a more rigorous quality control process to ensure data integrity

Depending on the approach you go with, there are a few tips that can save you time and budget in your migration process as well as eliminate hiccups along the way.

Tips for Automated AEM Migration

  1. For Adobe Experience Manager migration to go well, you need to establish access to the current production environment to pull up content and move it to the new staging area either manually or automatically.
  2. The legacy system requires you to conduct an underlying data analysis in order to structure content and assets.
  3. Build a code that will execute the move of the content to AEM. Your transformation scripts will probably be different depending on the content format and where it resides.
  4. Map old page URLs to paths in the new system programmatically.
  5. Code all digital assets such as images, PDFs, videos, and the like to the digital assets management paths in the new systems.
  6. Manually spot-check whether all content has been migrated correctly.
  7. Make sure to catalog live copy links and broken links for content that doesn’t match.
  8. Run your scripts to eliminate bugs and content discrepancies.
  9. Finally, resolve any issues with design refactoring by modifying and placing content appropriately in the new CMS.

Intricacies of Manual Migration to AEM

  1. Sort the content into AEM component properties to make it easy to maintain or extend things if needed.
  2. Estimate the time for the migration to AEM including the time necessary to run bug scripts, content localization issues, and other reruns.
  3. Clean up all special styling or HTML configurations to reduce cruft (unwanted code).
  4. Make sure you employ User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for all your site authoring tools and the new website’s look and feel.
  5. Take into account the risk of human error and the time needed to expose and fix issues.

The Keynote of Adobe Experience Manager Migration

Migration to AEM is no easy task given the fact how the CMS is built. However, the move can be made once you find your business is ready to scale. You should consider switching to AEM when you:

  • Run your business across several geographies or globally
  • Have an omnichannel online approach including web and mobile applications
  • Want to bring your developer and marketing teams together under one CMS
  • Need to execute and track campaigns from a unified dashboard
  • Want to personalize your offering and segment your audience more precisely
  • Have rich and numerous digital assets you want to showcase more effectively
  • See that your current CMS is not living up to your expectations, and has recurring technical issues which affect your rankings, conversions, and ROI.

To better understand which migration concept is more appealing for you, examine your site and see if the content is vast and can be well-structured. If so, you can try automated migration. On the other hand, if you have diversified content types that have a complex hierarchy, you may want to consider manual migration. To be on the safe side, let AEM professionals look into your particular case to make your AEM migration strategy a fast and productive experience.