During this Meetup, Concordia and INM discussed Concordia’s experience with re-platforming over 300 websites over to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and the various steps involved in making this happen. Concordia gave some background on their past website and digital landscape before the move over to AEM. Then they provided insights on why the decision to move over to AEM and what factors went into selecting the tool and their experience since making the upgrade. INM then shared about the various stages required for a project of this magnitude, such as: -Gathering user requirements by interviewing stakeholders -Laying out the information architecture -Designing wireframes -Back end and front end development -Integrating third-part technologies and systems -Coaching and author training To close the presentation, Andrei and Chantal discussed their recent migration to AEM 6.1, lessons learned and what’s next for Concordia. Concordia Speakers: Andrei is the Lead Designer at Concordia with a broad experience in front and back end development, WCMS technologies and UX design. Chantal is the Information Architect for Concordia.ca, Concordia’s intranet presence and MyConcordia portal. Both Andre and Chantal have been with Concordia since the inception of the migration project to CQ 5.6 in 2012. INM Speakers: Nadine is INM's team leader for many large scale mandates and has proven experience in guiding multi-disciplinary teams through several successful website projects. Nadine was involved in Concordia's re-platforming project.

1. Concordia University
Making the (up)grade
Andrei Kalamkarov
Web Designer
Chantal Bellemare
Information Architect
Nadine Husain
INM, Director of Operations

2. Agenda
➢ About Concordia University
➢ AEM replatforming project
➢ Concordia’s current environment
➢ Why upgrade?
➢ Upgrade challenges
➢ Testing and issues
➢ Big day
➢ What’s next?
➢ Q & A

3. About Concordia University
➢ 4 Faculties
➢ 41 Departments
➢ 13 Colleges/Schools/Institutes
➢ 39 Research Centres
➢ 203 Offices
➢ Over 300 undergraduate and 100 graduate programs
➢ 43,903 Students (2014/15)
➢ 3,863 Faculty & Staff (2014/15)

4. 1997

5. July
2013

6. August
2013

7. February
2016

9. February
2016

10. AEM Project Timeline
March 2012 Project start
Summer to Fall 2012 General awareness & brainstorming sessions
Fall 2012 Business requirements
Fall 2012 to Summer 2013 Template/component specs + IA
August 5, 2013 Go live!
April 30, 2015 Migration project officially over
October 4, 2015 Upgrade from 5.6 to 6.1

11. Initial Pain Points
➢ From an organisational and communication standpoint
○ Disjointed channels, user experiences, websites, multiple homepages
○ Decentralized workflows and processes per department
○ Difficulty reading content on mobiles
○ Duplicate and redundant information on multiples sites
➢ From a technical standpoint
○ Disjointed technologies and data sources
○ Fragmented admin tools
○ Challenges maintaining multiple versions, updates difficult, security…

12. Opportunities Identified
➢ From an organizational standpoint:
○ Co-sponsorship by the CCO and the CIO
○ Understand the impact of change
○ Desire to centralized information, content and assets and dynamically push content
○ Consolidate and control workflows while still allowing for independance
➢ From a user experience standpoint:
○ New contact points and possible experiences (mobile, social, blogs...) - in context / in real-time
○ Responsive design
○ Accessibility
➢ From a technical standpoint
○ Single underlying technology across departments
○ Capitalize on CMS with out-of-the-box capabilities

13. AEM was the perfect fit
➢ For end-users:
○ Excellent support for mobile through
responsive design and apps
○ Pertinent customized content
○ Coherent and consistent messaging
➢ For authors:
○ Easy and powerful solution for
maximum autonomy, productivity
and collaboration
○ Easy to learn and manage change
○ Sharing content and assets
○ Govern branding & communications
➢ For IT:
○ IT governance
○ Modular solution, open standards
○ Integrate through open-standard APIs
○ Scalable, maintainable, easy to evolve
➢ For organizations:
○ Consistent cross-channel experience
management
○ Predictable budget, ROI, incremental
investments
○ Adaptable to new business imperatives
○ Compliance (accessibility, security,
industry standards…)

14. The Adobe Advantage in Higher Education

15. Facts and Insights
➢ Stakeholder Buy-In
○ Awareness / brainstorming meetings with 750 stakeholders, AEM demos
○ Regular updates and communications
➢ Business Analysis & Department Buy-In
○ Current-state analysis: 100+ stakeholder interviews and group elicitation exercises
○ Specs & requirements: 16 department briefs, 14 BRDs, 9 functional specifications docs
○ Identification and prioritization of audiences (20+!)
➢ Information Architecture and Wireframing
○ Close to 40 wireframes to be categorized, approved and sent to design firm for mockups
○ Content audit and inventory with migration plan: 7000 pages to migrate automatically, 150
pages with semi-automation, 700+ pages to be manually migrated, 220 pages to rewrite!
➢ Development
○ 80 custom components and 30 templates
○ Agile development with dailies and sprint reviews across multiple teams and locations
➢ Training: author, developer and recordings

16. Lessons Learned
➢ At the proposal stage:
○ + Choosing technology first and then the appropriate technology partner
○ - Requesting services from supplier by role type
➢ Organizational:
○ + Importance to get buy-in / champions / change management
○ - Awareness sessions focused on details of possible improvements: hard promises to keep
➢ About the process:
○ Progressive knowledge transfer and training:
■ Demos to key stakeholders
■ Out-of-the-box AEM training
■ Customized training on Concordia-specific components, templates, environment
■ Coaching and knowledge transfer

17. Lessons learned (cont’d)
➢ Requirement gathering sessions
○ Helpful to get a better understanding of the current state
○ Not leading to innovation
➢ Competitive reviews
○ Helpful to identify features to include
○ Not leading to innovation
➢ UX
○ Means to drive innovation and differentiation

18. Concordia’s current environment
➢ In AEM: Public site (en/fr), Intranet, Shared Content (news & events)
○ 40K+ pages (including news & events)
○ 104 subsites
○ DAM is around 45GB
○ 35 templates, 100 custom components
○ Google Search Appliance
➢ Out of AEM: MyConcordia Portal, Moodle, Stingers (Cossette), Campus Stores, Student
Information System, HR Information System, etc.
➢ Over 300 trained AEM authors

19. Concordia’s web traffic
Unique visitors
4,311,115 unique visitors in 2015
12K per day
Pageviews
52,687,091 pageviews in 2015
6-8M per month
Device overview (2015)
Desktop - 74%
Mobile - 21%
Tablet - 5%

21. Project debt
Top items that were not completed during the migration project:
➢ System performance improvements
➢ Staging server
➢ Mobile site enhancements
➢ Search improvements
➢ Intranet improvements
Ref. Cross-functional focus group results from December, 2014

22. Why upgrade?
➢ Stability and performance issues on our 5.6 environment
○ Author slowing down or coming to a halt
○ Author has to be restarted often
○ Concordia.ca went down a few times
➢ Upgrading 5.6 to 6.1 seemed to be a promising solution
○ Adobe recommended the upgrade, "all problems will be resolved"
○ CQ 5.6 was over two years old and two versions behind
➢ Project initiated in May, 2015
○ Right around when 6.1 was released

23. Upgrade challenges
➢ Pick the right time for a content freeze over an extended period
○ Many announcements, daily news, etc.
➢ Work around vacations and back-to-school period
○ Two windows of opportunity: mid-summer and mid-fall
➢ Backups / roll-back procedure
➢ Transfer users, groups and permissions
➢ Installing / re-installing DAM packages is especially time-consuming
➢ In-place upgrade problematic (clean upgrade worked)

24. Touch UI?
➢ Not ready for Touch UI
○ Our components are not optimized for Touch UI
○ Authors need to be re-trained
➢ No critical need to switch at this time
○ Classic UI is working well in 6.1
○ All authors are on desktops
○ No obvious benefit
➢ Easy to force Classic UI as the only interface
○ In the OSGi Console

25. Test plan
➢ Front-end (content, design) and Author environment
➢ All templates and components (custom and out-of-the-box)
➢ Browser testing:
○ Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac
○ Chrome, Firefox and IE on PC
➢ Languages (EN, FR, ZH)
➢ Tags
➢ Adobe Tough Day (4.5 times faster on 6.1 than 5.6!)
https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-1/develop/test/tough-day.html

26. Some problems
➢ "New" features
○ Personalization / Client Context tool
➢ Backend system change
○ Switch to the Oak-based content repository
➢ Authoring problem
○ New workflows

27. Broken Sidekick
➢ ~2500 pages with accidental "Target"
○ No visible change to page in 5.6
○ In 6.1 the Sidekick breaks
➢ Enable "Client Context" on Author?
○ An unfamiliar feature available to everyone
➢ Disable component targeting
○ Feature is not used at preset
○ Revert pages where target was invoked
○ Transparent to users

28. Slow program search
➢ Program queries used full-text search
○ Example: jcr:contains(., 'biology')
○ Worked great in 5.6
○ 30-60 secs in 6.1
➢ Differences in how queries work in Oak
○ Oak does not index content by default
○ Queries still work, but probably very slow
○ Custom indexes need to be created
○ Lucene or Solr for speedy full-text search

29. Sub-assets are confusing
➢ Sub-assets are automatically generated for PDF files
uploaded to the DAM
○ Not in 5.6
○ Generates sub-asset PDF files for each page

30. Big Day - Friday, October 2, 2015
➢ Code freeze
○ Final code release on Monday, September 28
➢ DAM freeze
○ Thursday, October 1 at 5 p.m.
➢ Content freeze
○ Friday, October 2 at 5 p.m.
○ We had access to make emergency changes
➢ Upgrade process
○ Friday at 5 p.m. - Sunday at 5 p.m.
➢ Back to normal on Monday, October 5
○ Redirect to new Author link

32. Success?
➢ Experienced problems a month after go-live
○ Degrading Author performance
○ Blocked replication queues
○ Necessary reboots
○ Rapid repository growth
○ Repository corruption
➢ Learning curve for AEM maintenance and fine-tuning
○ Operations Dashboard
○ Monthly JCR compaction
○ Custom indexes, Lucene/Solr

33. What’s next
➢ Student Information System (SIS) - Integration projects
➢ UX lab
➢ Social Communities
➢ New visual elements
➢ Network with other Universities on AEM
solutions.forrester.com/Global/FileLib/Reports/Competitive_Strategy_In_The_Age_Of_The_Customer.pdf

34. Q & A