Content Migration to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Content migration is the process of moving your website with all its content and digital assets from one platform to another. This data migration can either be done manually or in an automated manner. One of the most effective CMS (Content Management Solution) available today is the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). AEM implementation is done to build contextual and personalized experiences for web and mobile touchpoints.

Content Migration Flow

Let us try to understand a few generic steps involved in the content migration flow before uploading any content to AEM:

1. Obtaining an inventory – Obtain the inventory of content that needs to be migrated to a new website or platform. This content should include not just text and images but all digital assets including CSS, JS, HTML files, binary objects, etc. This needs to be done both in the cases of web and mobile applications.

2. Cleaning up/ Sanitizing the content – Check the obtained content for migration and get rid of broken links, or any other issues in tag mapping, encoding, preserving the parent-child relationship, etc. You cannot upload any erroneous files to AEM as it increases the time and efforts spent on the migration process.Organizing the content hierarchy –  AEM is a hierarchical store which might not be the case with the legacy system from which migration is taking place. Hence, it becomes important to define the content hierarchy moving into AEM. There are many factors to consider when designing a content hierarchy ranging from frequency of content updates, logical bucketing on the basis of page types OR creation date, content interdependence between pages (dynamic content) etc.

The Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool in AEM helps you organize, share, distribute, and access any digital assets including images, texts, videos etc. Restructuring the content may lead to broken links or other encoding issues. Make sure that the URLs, bookmarks, and all the links work fine after migration (via Apache redirects, Sling mappings etc).

3. Organizing the content hierarchy –  AEM is a hierarchical store which might not be the case with the legacy system from which migration is taking place. Hence, it becomes important to define the content hierarchy moving into AEM. There are many factors to consider when designing a content hierarchy ranging from frequency of content updates, logical bucketing on the basis of page types OR creation date, content interdependence between pages (dynamic content) etc. The Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool in AEM helps you organize, share, distribute, and access any digital assets including images, texts, videos etc. Restructuring the content may lead to broken links or other encoding issues. Make sure that the URLs, bookmarks, and all the links work fine after migration (via Apache redirects, Sling mappings etc).  Uploading to AEM – Once you have finalized the content structure, you can upload the content to AEM.

4. Uploading to AEM – Once you have finalized the content structure, you can upload the content to AEM.

ETL Cycle in Content Migration

The ETL cycle involves a three step process to migrate content from one system to another. In this process, the content is extracted from a homogenous or heterogenous resource, transformed to a format compatible for storage and analysis, and loaded to the destination. There are many ETL tools available in the market like Talend Open Studio. Let’s take a look at the three-step process:

1. Extraction – Legacy systems may export content in flat file structures like CSV, XML, etc. In this step, the content is extracted from the source system before further processing.

2. Transformation –  In this step, the content is converted or transformed into the format required by the destination. This may involve rewriting links, mapping tags, removing outdated/unwanted information, and special character handling and encoding.

3. Load – This step involves loading the content to the target AEM and is dependent on the transformation step performed earlier. It can be done by using Sling Post Servlet, Content Loader in CRX, or Package Manager.

Conclusion

AEM is being widely used by large enterprise clients and has gained a solid reputation in delivering value. As compared to its competitors, it is way ahead in functionality and far more sophisticated in features.