How to Migrate from SiteCore to Adobe Experience Manager

Nothing in life remains unchanged. Even if you want it for reasons of simplicity. And this is especially the case in the turbulent and fast-paced environment of ecommerce.

The system that structures your entire digital presence and encompasses the whole look and feel of your brand is the content management system. Far more than the words and images that are plastered onto a website, your content management system is your designer toolkit for how you want your brand to come across to consumers.

And one of the best and most advanced content management systems that is currently available is Adobe Experience Manager. As such, it’s pretty common for brands to want to switch from their current not-so-great-and-quite-limited content management system for an improved one like AEM. 

And if you think about it, it makes sense. There are many roads that lead to Adobe Experience Manager: startups with an initial shoestring budget who start with a free CMS – like the internet’s undisputed popularity king of WordPress, or other great cheap options like Drupal or Joomla – before becoming profitable and outgrowing the limitations of cheap CMSs and want to migrate their content to a higher-functioning platform like AEM; or brands that have been bought by a conglomerate, which in turn inherits the content management system of their newly-purchased brand.

Now we’ve done a fair few CMS migrations and we’ve noticed that one of the most common among our clients is from SiteCore to Adobe Experience Manager. So frequent, in fact, that we’ve decided to write this blog post!

Now let’s get down to it.

Firstly, an in-depth review of the entire library of digital assets of the company is to be done, which means all websites based on language or location, LPs, properties, everything. This is followed by the creation of templates within AEM for each and every page, which is then going to be used as a blueprint for designing your pages via the node structure. Fortunately AEM has a neat feature, Content Fragments and Experience Fragments, which makes the migration of content much smoother.

Next up is the content audit, in which all digital assets are recorded and provides the baseline for future development. It’s a snapshot of current content and maps how it’s connected on the website.

Then you – or a tech consultancy that specializes in AEM – are going to carry out the migration process – which yes, unfortunately, does take quite a while yet it’s little surprise. 

The migration from SiteCore to AEM means migrating from C# to Java, languages which are not miles apart from each other – I think of it a bit like the difference between Portuguese and Spanish. But getting to understand the libraries of both languages does take a bit of time. Also, SiteCore shares a bunch of similar WCMS concepts with AEM, for example component/renderings, as well as layouts/templates.

For brands that have multiple websites in different languages in SiteCore, you’ll quickly learn that not only is this not an issue for AEM but actually one of the biggest strengths of AEM, given its core features of multi-site management, blueprints, live copies, and can be connected via Cloudwords, a translation provider for SiteCore.

Lastly, keep in mind that CMS migrations are tall orders and large undertakings. Removing a classic engine and inserting it into a modern one has to be flawless if it is to work to the desired effect. And so working with a dev and tech consultancy that is well-versed not only in AEM but in migrating CMSs is not only desired but a necessity. 

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading AEM consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.