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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Integrate DOJO developed website with AEM

Integrate DOJO developed website with AEM

This is basically a migration of one technology to AEM. There are cases when clients wants to replace the backend technology only. AEM can be integrated with any Java script libraries. Here we are showcasing how feasible it is to integrate DOJO developed site in AEM. Adobe Experience Manager implementation requires a technical team that understands the unique development challenges a custom CMS poses. 

Feasibility?

 Dojo is a front end development technique Toolkit by the Dojo Foundation featuring DHTML and AJAX functions. Dojo work well with all of the front end techniques like HTML5, JQuery etc. to use with any backend system/applications. Dojo development requires skilled developers who are good at DOJO and dtl language.

 Dojo can be integrated with AEM through an interaction Layer. AEM exposes many of the methods to integrate with any third-party applications. This enables applications to work seamlessly when integrated. A JSON layer is used to integrate AEM with dojo in this case. 

 Can we migrate a project which runs on DOJO to AEM?

 The asnwer is yes. We can create a package of DOJO front end files (Including .html) to upload into AEM. This can be created either using package manager or through maven build.

 Once this package is ready, it can be directly uploaded into to AEM Package maneger and install. This package may have differnt page setup and locations compared to a normal AEM Project.

 Any Drawbacks?

 Yes, the template, page concept is not involved in this and we are just reusing the existing normal front end html files with DOJO. We can have an authoring environment for authoring the components but the preview is not available since we will have to develop a new page in addition to DOJO Migrated page. Also there may be some Javascript path remapping issues, which we may have to fix once deployed.

 How does the DOJO normal files talk to AEM Backend? 

 We can have a JSON layer which talks between the DOJO and AEM. The authoring environment can invoke the osgi layer to create custom JSON files which DOJO is expecting.

 Integration Details

AEM is used as backend service . OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) is the Java framework which runs on AEM and generates the JSON Layer. The generated JSON layer is used to interact with dojo application. 

 Authoring, JSON Generation.

The data is authored by an author and this gets saved in AEM. User friendly authoring environment allows users to drag and drop the component and immediately start authoring. 

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JSON Generation:

Once the component is saved, OSGI runs in AEM helps to generate a JSON. A Java service used to generate OSGI Bundles needs to be created to generate JSON from the authored component. 

Any format of JSON can be generated as per dojo requirement here. Dojo needs to configure above data path of JSON while interacting and generating a page component.

DOJO Layer

We need to move all DOJO Libraries to AEM. Dojo related components and templates to be moved to respective folder of AEM.

Once all settings are done, while reloading the page, UI will be loaded with the respective component by its templates from dojo but content from AEM.

 AEM Project Maintenance w.r.t dojo

New versions of AEM are available so often. Upgrades can be done without much challenges since the front end is separated from backend.

Some of the issues we faced during migration 

Cannot use AEM image rendering concept, since DOJO uses own images and paths.

File name conflicts. Space is there in DOJO

AEM Caching is not used

Deployments are complex

Previews are not possible

Site management becomes complex