Steps For Content Migration in AEM – Manually or  with Content Transfer Tool

Looking at the benefits of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), like personalization, robust digital asset management, multi-channel content delivery, etc., businesses choose to perform AEM implementation for which we need content. Creating content from scratch would be tricky for large enterprises as they have spent years populating their sites. Here, one can opt for AEM content migration. As the term indicates, AEM content migration is shifting a website and its content from one platform to another. 

Why is AEM Content Migration Important? Additionally, when creating engaging content migration experiences for your customers or clients, you must opt for AEM content migration. It meets your requirement for transferring a website’s blog, videos, news, and other content from an old website to a new or upgraded one. 

Besides, AEM Content Migration helps track your user behavior to provide personalized content, improving your content, data security, website speed and performance, and more that may lead to better analytics, increased efficiency, and cost savings. But how can we successfully do AEM content migration? 

We have an article to help you with seamless content migration without data loss. 

Let’s get started.

Understanding AEM Content Migration

When you want to move your website’s content and digital assets onto another manually or automatically, you can do that through AEM content migration. This migration ensures that data is seamlessly moved and integrated into the new system without loss or compromise. To achieve a successful migration, it’s crucial to collaborate with a reputable AEM consulting company and experts who can oversee and manage the transition in a structured and efficient manner.

Steps for a Successful AEM Content Migration

• Defining and describing the content type. 
• Evaluating content, both quality and quantity-wise. 
• Filtering outdated content leveraging the evaluation metrics.
• Finalizing to be migrated content. 

Importance of AEM Content Migration

Why should we choose AEM content migration?

Well, AEM content migration assists marketing experts and IT professionals to:

• Deliver consistent, innovative, and scalable digital content experiences.
• Target offers better experiences at scale.
• Optimize and manage digital content.

Well, we can understand the importance of AEM content migration in various contexts, so let’s do this.

1. Data Integrity and Consistency

One of the chief reasons for content migration is to maintain data integrity and consistency. When you move your content from a source to a destination, it’s essential to ensure that every piece of content is transferred as required while preserving the context between the existing content.

2. User Experience

AEM holds the caliber to deliver a personalized and engaging user experience. Migrating content in AEM increases retention, boosts customer satisfaction, and improves the bottom line.

3. Seamless Scalability and Integration

With the expertise of an AEM developer, AEM supports seamless integration with a range of Adobe products, such as Adobe Target and other 3rd-party solutions. The process of AEM content migration enhances content modularity and reusability, ensuring that businesses can efficiently repurpose their digital assets. Moreover, AEM empowers enterprises to scale their content delivery across various channels, leveraging integrated tools and systems. This ensures a consistent and optimized user experience regardless of the platform.

4. Cost and Time Efficiency

In AEM, automated migration tools and processes diminish the effort and time needed to move a huge content volume compared to manual modes. By reducing the need for time and resources, the content migration process can significantly save costs, especially in the long term.

5. Improved Content Management Practices

AEM uses top-class practices for content management, like workflow, templates, and permissions. Migrating content to AEM lets organizations employ such features to build, manage, and provide content more effectively and efficiently.

6. Compliance & Security

AEM content migration assists in better compliance requirements management and protects sensitive information following security protocols.

7. Future Proofing & Flexibility

Digital content demands to emerge with changing customer expectations and market needs. AEM’s regular updates and flexible architecture indicate the platform can adapt to future trends and needs after content migration.

Critical Steps for a Successful AEM Content Migration

In a digital transformational journey, content migration plays a vital role. With better strategy, planning, and every aspect of the content migration, you can attain its success seamlessly.

The AEM content migration process follows four steps; let’s check out each sequentially.

Step 1: Content Evaluation

The basic and the foremost step of the AEM content migration process is content evaluation, where:

• Content is defined,
• Varied types of content are identified, and
• The current source and state of to-be-migrated content is discovered.

After defining and identifying the content type, content evaluation is performed, after which you can separate the obsolete content from the evaluation metrics, and the content to be migrated is finalized.

Step 2: Content Mapping

As you now have the final content for migration, you can start with content mapping between the old and current Java Content Repository (JCR) properties in AEM.

While the process continues, you will identify every attribute from the old systems or platforms you want to migrate and the corresponding attributes you want to populate.

Step 3: Content Migration

Ahead, as you have content to migrate and know how to map it, you can move on to designing the apt solution to implement it.

You can choose any method from below depending on varied factors, like content cleaning, volume, technical feasibility, structure, cost, and time:

1. Manual Migration

You can opt for this mode of migration when you have:

• A few pages of content to migrate,
• To clean a huge volume of content (like fixing issues, broken links, encoding problems, or tag mapping),
• Non-structured content in your old system or non-compatible content in your new system.

2. Automated Migration

You can go with this way of migration if you have:

• Structured content in your old system,
• Huge content volume or pages to migrate, or
• Less content cleaning requirement.

Automated content migration can be achieved using the content transfer tool (we will discuss it later in this post).

3. Hybrid Migration

This mode of content migration is best if you have:

• A huge content or varied pages for migration,
• Structured and unstructured content in the old system or
• Less content for cleaning.

Step 4: Content Verification

After content migration, the last and final step in AEM is content verification, which ensures the content is transferred to the right destination. Besides, you need to verify the migrated content; the newly authored content coexists with no issues.

AEM Content Migration Using Content Transfer Tool – Pace Up The Process

One of the most recommended ways to migrate content in AEM from an on-premise (known as on-premises) or AEM’s AMS-hosted version to an AEM as a Cloud Service environment.

Once you install the content transfer tool, you can run it from the AEM source instance.

Phase 1 – Extraction

Initially, a migration set is drawn from the AEM source instance. This set includes all AEM content, such as digital assets and pages that we want to migrate.

The migration set is defined using the content transfer tool.

Phase 2 – Ingestion

The migration set (we extracted) is ingested from the temporary storage site into the target AEM as a cloud service environment. 

Hint: The best practices to conduct on the AEM source instance before you let it run on the content transfer tool are:

• Run compaction or revision cleanup on the source instance.
• Opt for offline compaction, which will reduce the repository size.
• Perform data store consistency checks using the oak-run jar to avoid unexpected effects.
• Resolve issues if they arise during the consistency check.

Note: The extraction extracts the content temporarily to the disk first and then uploads it to the temporary cloud storage location. So, check for sufficient free disk space on the AEM Source instance hardware. Leave extra free space of about 1.5 times the current repository size.

How Does Emizentch Help You?

A proper understanding of an AEM content migration process is necessary. Still, you would need assistance from an AEM consulting company to ensure the process goes smoothly without any issues or data loss while your business runs efficiently.

You can turn your head to none other than Emizentech. Holding a team of professional and skilled AEM consultants, the company has a proven track record of successful AEM content migration accomplished for worldwide clients.

Key Highlights to Consider

• Presentable portfolio with successful accomplishments,
• Expert certifications,
• Skilled teams of AEM consultants,
• Robust connection with past clients, etc.

Wrapping Up!

So, whichever you need digital content optimization or management, you can opt for AEM content migration, which helps create a winning customer experience.

Successful AEM content migration demands the most suitable method that may make the process seamless and under control. So, whichever mode you choose, ensure it’s apt for your content migration requirements and necessities.

Connect with an AEM consulting company today!

Frequently Ask Questions (FAQs)