Implementing the latest version of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) allows you to accelerate innovation, source and manage assets exponentially, and manage your content and experiences. Last week, I discussed planning your migration to AEM, which is the first stage in the recent guide, Plan, Build, and Run: What to Expect When Migrating to Adobe Experience Manager.
Now, it’s time bring those plans to life. “Build” is where the rubber meets the road! There’s a lot involved in your build, which includes developing the user experience (UX) and supporting visual design, standing up your infrastructure, building components, creating a content strategy, migrating content, developing back-end functionality and integration with other platforms/systems, and establishing reports. A few highlights:
Consider agile and waterfall methodologies
Agile methodology may not fully support every aspect of your implementation, especially if you’re re-platforming. When re-platforming, you ultimately deliver a large amount of functionality, so your first build likely needs to include many elements of the Waterfall methodology.
Design a great user experience
User experience is your customer’s experience with a specific digital channel, be it your website, an app, or a piece of software. Your website is often the first experience a potential buyer has with your company, and you can’t have a great customer experience without a great user experience. Just as quality and consistency are key components of a brand, so is having a quality and consistent user experience.
Standing up your Adobe infrastructure
When working with an implementation partner like Perficient Digital, you will create an infrastructure roadmap that defines and/or documents: physical architecture, deployment, access and identity management, security audit, and disaster recovery. For more on best practices for managing AEM projects check out the complete checklist.
Sizing and licensing
While most Adobe Experience Cloud products – including Analytics, Target, and Audience Manager – are SaaS-only offerings, AEM is available through on-premises licenses and Adobe Managed Services (AMS).
Constructing your site
When building your site on AEM, the number of components your site requires will help determine the scope of the project. You will want to consider reusing and/or extending existing components when designing. This aids in efficiency and cost-savings when developing for AEM.
Defining the authoring experience
While much of the development focuses on the experience from your customer’s view, it’s also important to build a site that your team can easily manage and maintain.
Quality assurance and testing
Testing throughout the build ensures that your site meets the business requirements while providing customers with a stable and defect-free
experience.
Content migration
Before migrating content, it’s important to develop a content strategy that is championed (and overseen) by a content strategist. This individual will also define a taxonomy, work with you on representing a product hierarchy, and help you evaluate existing content and assets to be migrated to the new platform.
With so much to consider, it’s important to put thought into each stage before jumping in. Download the full guide for more information.
Have you migrated to AEM 6.3? We’d love to hear what helped you through the process!
