Steps to migrate third party CMS website to AEM

AEM(Adobe Experience Manager) is getting more and more popular, due to its enterprise capability for managing content. There are cases where we need to migrate third-party CMS sites to AEM.
Some examples could be Drupal to AEM, Salesforce to AEM e.t.c.

Let us understand the common process of migration. I will take you through the steps to migrate any third-party CMS websites to AEM.

Below listed are the major steps in a migration project.
Analyzing the current system with integration elements involved
Define content strategy
Define asset Strategy
Design the new system with integration
Migrate the content to the new system
Test the new system

Background
While migrating a site, we should have an understanding of the current site CMS; then map it with related elements in AEM.

For eg., A site made in WordPress will have the content stored in a location and images, videos, and pdfs in some repository. Understanding the layers in both CMS plays a big role in delivering a successful migration.

Setting up the environment
To ensure a smooth migration, we need an AEM DEV environment ready where we can quickly move the data from the current system. The minimal DEV environment configuration could be just an author instance with 2 to 4 publish instances and a dispatcher.

Strategy to Migrate Content
Below are steps to be carried out for a smooth content migration

Content Evaluation
Cleaning up/ Sanitizing the content
Content Mapping - Organizing the content hierarchy
Design

Based on the analysis of the existing system, we need to design a solution that has proper
Digital asset structure, metadata, tagging, client library, target AEM templates and
components
Content Migration - There are many ways to do this.
Manual Migration(When the content in the old system is not structured)
Automation Migration(When the content in the old system is structured)
Hybrid Migration(When there is structured and unstructured content in the old system)

Content Verification

Assets Strategy
Assets play an important role in any CMS. We need to carry out,

• Asset migration and categorization
• Extract and update metadata from the old system to AEM

Getting into action
Based on the design we need to have templates, and components created.

We need to identify the tools/ methods available to export data from the current system to AEM once the templates and components are ready. AEM follows a hybrid way of content migration in almost all scenarios.

REST API for migration
Some of the CMS systems provide a REST API layer where the content is exposed. We can invoke them in AEM and get those data exported into AEM directly.

To achieve this, our migration scripts should have,
Map the templates from the current system to AEM
Map the components from the current system to AEM



Once the content and assets are migrated, we can start manual testing on the pages by creating new pages as per design.

How do we estimate an AEM Migration project?
List templates
Estimate the templates
List components
Estimate the components
Analyze the current CMS content ( XML/JSON Data)
Estimate the scripts for each component (XML/JSON Data to AEM Component)
Estimate asset migration and categorization(Extract and update metadata for digital assets on AEM)
Estimate the Analytics part
Estimate Integration (Login, Authorization, Search)
Estimate Workflow creation