A program managers thoughts on site migration to AEM

Let us see how a project manager should think before he starts with a site migration to AEM. What things he needs to consider? The history of AEM has seen thousands of migration to AEM. But how many were successful? How many of them were cost effective? Let us do an analysis.

Planning before he starts.
There are multiple planning sessions to be done before actual migration starts.

Cost/ Budget Planning

The PM should think of the total cost estimated for the complete implementation. This includes initial setup, UI development/ UI changes, developing new feature additions, QA tools, platforms, integration costs, licensing costs etc.

Technical Planning

PM should get a clarity on the total number of sites, UX changes, data conversions, system integration, any analytical and personalization items.

Team Planning

Right mix of technology team is necessary for any development. For an AEM, the considerations should be the back-end, front-end capabilities of a developer including various integration through web-service layer, analytics, search etc.

Implementation Planning

Define the correct time frame with a proper sprint planning. Include the team in discussions is necessary for this.

Integration planning

Third party integration can be complex task when the developers are not aware of it. Always try to add a developer who knows the various integration like search, analytics, web-service etc.

QA Planning
Define a QA Strategy and ensure the test cases are prepared well before the actual development.

Deployment Planning

Ensure the DEV and QA work together to make the deployment process success. Define a deployment strategy considering latest tools and technologies available.

Set a well defined communication channel for the deployment process which makes the deployment smooth and success. Ensure the roll back and disaster recovery are considered in planning.

Post deployment planning

Regular Monitoring of performance and any backups are to be planned as part of this.

He or she should also consider the partnerships for AEM implementation, Adobe cloud solutions and infrastructure in course of time. Let me know your migration experiences through comments section.

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AEM Content Solutions

Have you thought the ways we can implement a website in AEM? I am going to discuss some of the approaches here. Do let me know your thoughts through the post comments area.

1) AEM - The traditional way:

Here AEM is used as a pure solution. All the content and data are fed into AEM. The pages are authored in AEM including the DAM assets. In this scenario, there is no integration of any type of application with AEM. Here rendering is done through AEM.

2) AEM - As Hybrid Approach:

This is the most common way. Here the pages, assets are fed into AEM through authoring. Integrations like data access, social integrations are handled through web service calls. In this scenario there is always an integration layer, which could be used for search, data base authentication etc. Here rendering is through AEM.

3) AEM - As web content Model

Not a common way of implementing  projects in industry, but yet to analyse the abundant capabilities. Here AEM is used as a data storage layer. The data gets into AEM from various sources like DB, third party data etc. Once the data is available in AEM, it can be made available to other systems through a different user interface technology other than AEM provided. Here rendering is through different technology. AEM makes the data available in a generalised way(Either JSON or XML formats) to the front end here.

How do we make the AEM content to third party applications?

The usual way of making AEM content to third party application is through a web service layer. We can utilise the sling API's to invoke the specific component or page and create required custom format JSON and pass it to service layer.

AEM contents are page oriented. How do we make component level information?
Have you heard of content fragments? The latest AEM provide content fragments - makes the Content As A Service (CaaS) way of implementation. These are components like structure which are not bonded to a specific page. We can author a content data with its metadata. Content fragments can even be transformed to its language versions. Watch this place for more details.