Introduction
AEM Migration or Adobe Experience Manager Migration is one of the strategic moves by developers and marketers to push their customer interest ahead to a lasting experience. However, the common query is, why switch or migrate from your existing CMS or content management system to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?
Let’s understand it here.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an advanced content management system (CMS) from the Adobe Experience Cloud suite that empowers brands with various applications, including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target, and more. It’s built on various components, making it a robust platform for brand building in the digital landscape and enhancing customer experience.
If we compare Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) with any other CMS system, the differences are in various capabilities where AEM leads, including scalability, multi-channel delivery, complex content workflow, flexibility, security, personalization, security, compliance, total time-to-market, and more.
AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) Migration Strategy
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) opens up new possibilities, scalability, and scope for innovation in your content management that impacts your overall customer experience. When your existing CMS fails to match your business agility requirements, then migrate to AEM. However, migration to AEM is a complex process that requires an experienced AEM migration services expert to ease the migration without losing anything in minimal or no downtime. Here, we have a basic AEM migration strategy guide to plan a smoother migration accordingly.
Preparation Phase
The first phase is preparation, where the foremost step of migration starts. Here, you need to go as detailed as possible in documentation and organize the execution process for all upcoming phases.
Assess Current Environment
Time to assess your existing CMS environment thoroughly, where you need to analyze and decide what to bring over as-is, what not to bring over, what elements need improvement, where updates or upgrades are required, and to what extent.
Define Objectives
Here comes one of the most crucial and essential phases where you need to define the goals and objectives of your migration strategy. Every organization and business setup has different goals that need to be achieved by this CMS migration. AEM brings some significant improvement to your CMS, such as consistent content across sites, seamless integration with existing tech stacks, and more.
Select the Right Tools
Once the objectives are clear, select the appropriate tool for migration, though Adobe’s built-in migration tools are sufficient to help you and your team achieve seamless migration. Yet some custom CMS solutions may need extra migration tools to extract and transform existing data and assets, so find them before the actual migration.
Plan Architecture
In order to define architecture, you and your team need to discuss this with the Adobe success team and get to the one that meets your business needs. All the stakeholders, their respective roles, content hierarchy, user access and permissions, and more should be discussed as the architectural components. Your focus should be on the pain points of existing CMS architecture so the AEM will be able to overcome those challenges and improve your customer experience in the future.
Design and Development Phase
In your AEM migration strategy, this phase is really crucial, as you need to focus on bridging the gap between your existing CMS and AEM. Try to find similarities in integrations, content, customizations, and data between existing CMS and AEM functionalities. Ensure that the content should align with the old and new ones.
Content Mapping
Content mapping is a detailed and crucial process that requires spending ample time to match content types and fields from existing CMS to AEM. You need to create a detailed map of all existing content types and fields, and then you need to pair them with the appropriate content types and fields of AEM as they appear in the AEM for accurate content migration. Plus, you need to make sure to map the existing CMS’s metadata and attributes to the same values of AEM.
Custom Development
Your existing CMS environment assessment must have highlighted the customized sections. Now, you need to replicate or upgrade (if necessary) these custom sections within the AEM environment, which includes custom templates, components, scripts, and more.
3rd Party Integrations
After the customizations, you need to look for the ‘3rd Party Integrations’ from your environment assessment. These integrations need to be replicated and tested in the Adobe Experience Manager to ensure seamless functionality and data flow without interruptions.
Set Up Environments
We have moved to another vital phase where development, production, and testing need to be set up in the AEM environment according to the environment. Your IT team needs to evaluate and find AEM features for your business requirements and get them set up accordingly.
Migration Execution Phase
We are at the crucial phase where the actual migration takes place after the successful content mapping, integrations, and customizations aligned with the AEM environment. As this is a crucial phase, one needs to be careful and watchful during the migration without losing anything.
Content Migration
Now that the official migration to AEM has started, it is time to migrate content from the existing CMS to AEM. After the successful mapping of all the existing content to the AEM, it is going to migrate to the new CMS, i.e. AEM. Here, most likely, you’re going to use the extra migration tool that you have selected to migrate all your content to AEM.
Implement Redirections
AEM migration needs to be seamless and smooth without losing anything during the migration process. In this phase, you need to create redirects from any old URLs to new URLs hosted through AEM to ensure there are no SEO dropoffs, site traffic interruptions, and downtime. You need to carefully review all old URLs as cataloged and found in the initial assessment and then redirect all of them.
Data Validation
Data validation is the phase where we ensure, check, and validate that all the URLs, links, content assets, and necessary data have been transferred to AEM as they used to be your previous CMS. You can re-check that the data came through correctly, exactly the way it used to be.
Testing and Quality Assurance (QA) Phase
At this phase, we test and ensure the site’s performance through various stress tests. The testing and QA phase requires testing of the new site’s functionality, performance under load, compatibility, and robustness of site security against various scenarios. Here, you should involve all the stakeholders for testing and collect their feedback to make the required adjustments or troubleshoots.
Launch and Post-Launch Phase
After the successful migration to AEM, we are ready to launch the new site and deliver the desired experience. It is always recommended that your site is continuously monitored and its performance evaluated compared to that of the previous CMS. During this, keep your focus on the feedback from different stakeholders and the performance matrices to fix the issues and improve the experience.
Final Words
Adobe Experience Manager, or AEM, is a leading content management system (CMS) that overcomes the limitations of existing CMS systems and empowers marketers and businesses to look beyond the traditional experience quotients for innovative and extraordinary experiences. AEM collects the advantages of an advanced content management system, digital asset management, a learning management system (LMS), digital enrollment and forms, and other capabilities that make it a complete solution for transforming experiences.
AEM simplifies the demand for personalization at scale without losing a customer’s interest. The decision to migrate from the existing CMS to AEM requires an efficient AEM migration strategy to minimize friction and ensure a seamless migration without losing anything. Our experts at Krish bring this basic migration strategy guide for you to ease the migration and move ahead for a better experience. If you are seeking an AEM migration services expert, then connect with our expert and get a detailed consultation to ensure a smoother migration.
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Abhilash is a coffee-fanatic marketer and storyteller, always seeking new experiences and captivating stories from life. With his meticulous research and vivid narratives, he simplifies complex technologies accessible to all. He spends much of his spare time on traveling and stories from life.
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The Ultimate Guide to AEM Content Migration
15 November, 2024 Customer demands are rising with the introduction of new experience factors and competition from the market. Once brands decide to enhance the customer experience (CX) and offer them the best they can have from their favorite brands, then AEM Cloud services take the lead. When you wish to migrate your existing web application to AEM’s experience platform, the content and other digital assets must be migrated from the existing CMS to AEM. It’s known as AEM content migration, which ensures that each of these digital assets, pages, and content can seamlessly and easily be migrated into the new system without any loss or compromise during transit.
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