FUNDAMENTAL

GUIDE FOR
MIGRATING
CONTENT TO
AEM
www.tothenew.com
FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM

CONTENT
1. Introduction 3

2. Manual vs. Automated Content Migration 4

3. Content Migration Flow 5

4. ETL Cycle 5
4.1 Extraction 5

4.2 Transformation 6

4.3 Load 6

5. Content Migration via ETL Tool (Talend) 8

5.1 Pre-Migration Cleanup 9

5.2 Extraction & Transformation 9

9
5.3 Post Migration Cleanup
10
5.4 Packaging

6. Conclusion 10

7. About the Author 10

8. About TO THE NEW 11

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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM

1. INTRODUCTION
Organizations, big or small, almost always have agreements and so on over to the new system.
to deal with upgrading their systems because of This moving of “old” data into a “new” system/
the fast evolving technology landscape. Data application requires migration.
produced using legacy systems is an important
While there are many use cases of content
asset for an organization which it would like to
migration, this ebook would focus on handling
migrate to the new system. For instance, any
migration to Adobe Experience Manager(AEM).
company would like to retain attendance
records of all employees, policy documents,

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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM
2. MANUAL VS. AUTOMATED CONTENT
MIGRATION
Content migration activities in AEM would
involve migrating all digital assets (pages,
images, videos, and even code files like CSS,
Javascript, JSP, Java etc.) over TO THE NEW
system. Two broad ways to go about content
migration would be:
1. Manual
Put in a team of 10 awesome content authors
and let them loose, manually migrating content
from old system over TO THE NEW system.
To sum it up, following is a comparative analysis between Manual/Automated content migration
Manual
Easy (“Lift” and “Shift” approach)
Tight control over migration process and
cleaning up of outdated information residing in
existing system
Time consuming (Expensive)
10 days for small site ~1000 pages
15-30 days for ~ 15K pages
(Figures are indicative)
For plain content migration, no technical/
coding skills required
Error prone due to manual intervention
(Links rewriting, tags mapping etc)
2. Automated
Use tools and methodologies to automate
the entire process. While initial development
effort would be high and may be complex
(depending on the content being migrated).
For large migration projects automation is the
only practical way forward.
Automated migrations can be divided into
3 phases (Extract Transform Load). There are
some ETL tools that can help in migration. One
such ETL tool Talend , is discussed in this E-book.
Automated
Initial Difficulty (requires custom development,
and initial ramp up required to work with the
tool)
Not all content can be easily migrated such as
backend code, complex objects tied to legacy
system etc
Time Efficient
2 - 3 days ~1000 pages
4 - 6 days ~ 15K pages
(Indicative figures. Includes any custom
development time)
Requires some amount of technical/coding skills
Once tested properly, should lead to much
lesser defects over large number of pages
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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM
3. CONTENT MIGRATION FLOW
The basic content migration flow needs to cater
to the following points:
1. Obtain an inventory of content that needs to
be migrated. For a web application this would
typically have digital assets (images, videos,
CSS, JS, HTML files and other binary objects).
2. Clean up/Sanitize source content for any
potential issues such as encoding
(Especially with asian languages), broken
links, tags mapping, preserving parent child
relationship etc.
3. Organise content in logical hierarchy as per
new site structure in AEM. Example, migrating
from a legacy CMS to AEM, where in legacy
CMS, all pages might be maintained within a
single root, whereas in AEM this would typically
be bucketed using some convention such as
page publish date, or page creation date etc.
4. ETL CYCLE
ETL tools extract data from heterogeneous or
homogeneous resources, transform it to be
stored in similar format for analysis, and load the
data into target source. There are many such
tools available in the market and Talend Open
Studio is one such tool and is the major focus
area for this ebook.
For Instance, Old content url: www.legacycms.
com/new-festivities-begin.html
New content path: /content/newcms/en/2015/
jun/new-festivities-begin.html
Similarly digital assets (images, videos, binary
content etc) could be migrated to AEM DAM.
4. Extending from the previous point, ensure
issues
URLs and bookmarks work after migration. So
even though the internal content structure is
changed by organizing it logically for better
manageability, end users should not have to
experience broken links or re-direction to error
pages. This could be done post migration as
well via web server configurations.
5. Upload this transformed content to AEM.
Some common approaches will be discussed in
this ebook.
4.1 Extraction
Content extraction from legacy system is one
of the major and most important task. Usually
legacy systems would export data in some form
or the other. Some of the common ways for
exporting content could be in flat file structures
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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM
such as text, XML, CSV etc. while others might
just expose their underlying storage (such as
a database) from which content could be
extracted using API level integrations.
4.2 Transformation
Content transformation is the step where source
content is transformed into desired content
structure to meet new system’s requirement.
Extracted content may not always be in desired
format and hence it becomes necessary to do
a pre-migration cleanup/sanitization of source
content. Basic cleanup/sanitization includes :
• Any links rewriting, tags mapping etc.
• There might be a scenario where some of the
information need not to be moved TO THE NEW
system e.g. any outdated information, unused
assets etc.
• Special character handling and encoding are
common issues that one faces during migration
which should be handled during transformation.
4.3 Load
This step simply refers to process of loading
content on target (AEM) system.This is a very
major and important step in the content
migration process because the method of
content load has a lot of bearing on the previous
(Transformation) step.
Listed following are 3 ways to load content into
AEM.
(i) Using Sling Post Servlet
AEM uses Apache Sling as the underlying web
application framework. Apache Sling provides
Sling Default Post Servlet implementation which
is a great way to modify or create content in a
JCR repository via simple HTTP requests.
In this approach, source content sanitization
and organizing content in new site structure
would typically be carried out beforehand.
This sanitized and logically structured content
could then be POSTed to SlingDefaultPostServlet
which will create the necessary node structure
in the underlying JCR repository to represent
that content.
(ii) Content Loader in CRX
AEM’s repository (CRX) provides Content loader
feature which is one of the ways to upload
content to repository. Though it should be noted
that this feature is deprecated in latest versions
of CRX.
(iii) Package Manager
One of the most common ways to install/
upload content (including deployable code)
to an AEM repository is Package Manager
utility. It is an advanced tool for defining,
creating, and managing content packages.
Content packages can be uploaded to and
downloaded from the repository, as well as
created and downloaded on-the-fly. Package
definition supports multiple node hierarchies
and advanced content filtering for maximum
flexibility.
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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM
A package is essentially a zip file holding
repository content in the form of a file-system
serialization (called “vault” serialization).
Default Sling Post Servlet
Versatile utility in that it gives a lot of flexibility for
data handling.
Could be used to create lots of content.
There is no limit to the amount of content that
could be uploaded to/created in AEM using
SlingPostServlet.
Good where content size is huge (>10 GB)
Does not offer rollback feature in case something
goes wrong.
Overwritten content cannot be rolled back to
previous state.
Could overwrite existing content though
content deletion does not happen (unless
explicitly asked for).
Packages include content, both page-content
and project-related content, selected using
filters.
Package Manager
Very nifty tool that can handle most use-cases
but may fall short in some edge cases.
Packages over 2GB in size may run into issues.
Good method for relatively small to medium
content migration. Though could be used for
large content migrations as well by logically
segregating content into multiple packages
and ensuring each package size remains <2 GB.
Offers rollback feature.
This ensures that in case wrong content has
been uploaded then via package uninstall
feature, AEM is restored to previous state.
This is a very powerful feature of packages in
AEM.
In addition,it is a great way of transferring
content across different AEM servers.
If not properly configured, can overwrite and/
or delete existing data. If configured, allows
merging new data with any existing data.
This strategy is useful when doing phased
migration for a large website where entire
website content cannot be migrated in one go
and needs to be migrated section by section.
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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM

5. CONTENT MIGRATION VIA ETL TOOL

(TALEND)
Talend is an open source software vendor that features to its users and site authors.
provides data integration, data management,
Legacy CMS can provide an export of the
enterprise application integration and big data
source content pages in one unified XML file.
software and services.

When working with Talend Studio, you will often

come across words such as repository, project,
workspace, Job,component and item. Most
important of which is Job which can contain sub-
jobs. Talend jobs provide process orchestration
which defines the processes that would be
executed in a predefined sequence. It translates
business needs into code, routines and programs.
A subjob can further consist of modularized
components that are used to perform a specific
data integration/transformation operation. For
instance, tfileInputXML is a component which is
used to read an Input XML file.
Below is a real life use-case for a client migrating
from a legacy CMS e.g. Drupal to Adobe
Solution Overview
The solution was designed in Talend Open Studio
which was the ETL tool of choice.
The whole ETL process was segregated into
multiple Talend jobs with each job having
specific responsibility. Some of these jobs are
explained in detail.
A basic migration job in this case would look like
the Fig 5.1.
This job consists of four sub-jobs named:
1. Pre-migration Cleanup
2. Extraction & Transformation

Experience Manager 6.0

3. Post Migration Cleanup

UseCase 4. Packaging

A client is using a legacy CMS Drupal to manage

its ever increasing digital content and would
like to migrate to AEM to provide enhanced

Fig 5.1 Soluton Overview

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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM
5.1 Pre-Migration Cleanup
A pre-migration cleanup job in this case would
look like Fig 5.2. This job reads the input content
(XML in this case) and breaks it into smaller
manageable XML files which each represent
a unique page in the source system. This could
be achieved by writing some custom code
OR by leveraging the Out of the Box Talend
component such as tadvancedFileOutputXML.
The generated smaller XML files are kept in
filesystem. The next process step (transformation)
would work with these XMLs to transform them
to AEM compatible XML files.
In addition this job is used for :-
Correcting character encoding issues
URL handling and re-writing issues.
Fig 5.2 Pre Migration Clean Up
Fig 5.3 Extraction & Transformation
5.2 Extraction & Transformation
The transformation job in this case would look
like Fig 5.3. This jobs reads the XMLs created in
the previous step one by one, transforms each
XML into AEM specific XML schema, places it
under new site structure (jcr_root hierarchy on
file system), and renames xml to “.content.xml”
for an AEM page.
5.3 Post Migration Cleanup
This job is required if there are any post migration
cleanups. Typical post migration cleanup jobs
could be :
Tags mapping
URL mapping
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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM
5.4 Packaging
This is the final step of migration which creates
the archive for the migrated pages. It is a
straight-forward component that does the job
Fig 5.4 Extraction & Transformation
6. CONCLUSION
Content Migration is an important activity in
redevelopment of a website. Though we can
automate the migration process, a little manual
effort will be always required for signing off the
entire migration.
7. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Geetika Chhabra | AEM Consultant
Geetika is a technology enthusiast, a quick
learner and has vast experience in CQ/AEM
development. She is an Oracle Certified Java
programmer (OCJP). She is a great team
for us. Keep in mind that the package needs to
be AEM compatible i.e. it should contain jcr_root
& META_INF folder and associated metadata
properties as per AEM packaging standard.
No matter which option you choose for
migration, Manual or Automated, careful
planning is a must when it comes to migrating
the existing website.
player and is also a part of infrastructure group
at TO THE NEW. In her idle time, you can find
her reading novels, playing table-tennis and
listening to music.
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FUNDAMENTAL GUIDE FOR MIGRATING CONTENT TO AEM

8. ABOUT TO THE NEW

TO THE NEW is a digital technology company experts, video specialists and creative mavericks
that builds disruptive products and transforms who have transformed businesses of more than
businesses. We leverage the power of 300 companies spread across 30 countries
experience design, cutting-edge engineering, worldwide. We take pride in our culture which is
cloud and analytics led marketing to enable driven by passion for making an impact through
digital transformation. technology.

Our passionate team of 750+ people includes

passionate technologists, digital analytics

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