When Adobe sells Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) upgrades, it does what any good salesperson will do: gloss over negatives (AEM is complex).

When selling a product or service, the salesperson will naturally emphasize the BEST parts of what they are selling. And not say as much about the WORST parts of the sale.

So perhaps the salesperson will emphasize that AEM is powerful, fast, automated, and intelligent.

The one word the salesperson probably won’t use?

Complex.

AEM is complex

But AEM is complex, and we must acknowledge this.

Whenever considering the purchase or lease of a product or service (such as AEM), perform your due diligence and see what the competitors are saying. You may still go through with the purchase anyway, but you will get a more balanced view of what you are buying.

And if you listen to AEM’s competitors, you will soon discover that AEM is not perfect.

  • One competitor claims that “[p]roprietary technology makes AEM difficult to manage.”
  • Another competitor states that AEM “doesn’t integrate easily with tools outside its ecosystem.”
  • And a third competitor asserts that AEM “almost always requires heavy IT involvement and sometimes year long (or more) implementation cycles.”

These arguments are partially based upon AEM’s feature-rich offerings, which serve to make an AEM implementation more difficult than, say, a WordPress implementation. A simpler solution may be easier to upgrade, but the loss of functionality impacts your business and its bottom line.

Yet there certainly is a kernel of truth in the competitors’ claims, and anyone implementing, maintaining, or upgrading an AEM solution needs to keep its complexity in mind.

And AEM users must figure out how best to implement AEM despite its complexity.

How AEM Resurgence mitigates the complexity of AEM upgrades

Acknowledging that AEM is complex—something that Adobe won’t readily tell you about AEM upgrades—you need to seek ways to mitigate its complexity while taking advantage of its many benefits.

This is something that we at KBWEB Consult have taken to heart with our “AEM Resurgence” program to refresh, update, and upgrade existing AEM implementations. AEM Resurgence not only guards against the complexity of AEM but also takes steps to reduce that complexity.

Let’s review the AEM Resurgence phases and see how KBWEB Consult reduces AEM upgrade complexity.

Phase 1: Diagnose Project Status or Stalemate

This is the phase in which KBWEB Consult performs an implementation health check and completes a project status report.

The health check itself can discover inadvertent reasons for AEM complexity, such as misconfigurations. And the project status report highlights those unnecessary complexities, allowing you to address them in the next phase.

Phase 2: Define Completion Roadmap

Based upon the project status report developed above, KBWEB Consult completes the project plan that will govern the next steps in the project. The project plan highlights the following:

  • In the project plan, we will identify any unnecessary complexities in your system, such as the use of an outmoded and complicated interface, and provide steps to correct these complexities.
  • While outlining new features in the project plan, we will endeavor to implement these features in a way that is as “clean” as possible, with no unnecessary complexities. This streamlined approach provides you with the functionality you demand.

Phase 3: Execute and Optimize Implementation

KBWEB Consult then uses the project plan to guide the steps that follow. As described above, KBWEB performs your upgrade in a way that removes existing complexities and doesn’t introduce new ones.

In addition, we ensure that the system can be maintained and upgraded in the future. While executing the implementation, KBWEB Consult takes care to document all necessary steps taken to ensure that the implementation can be easily maintained later.

Phase 4: Validate and Launch

One of the deliverables in this phase is launch support documentation. This ensures that all your staff, all your contractors, and all KBWEB Consult staff enjoy a common approach to the upcoming launch.

All responsibilities are well-defined, and everyone knows what to do. Again, this ensures a smooth launch that minimizes problems and mitigates risk.

Phase 5: Provide Dedicated Outsourced Support

As I discussed in a previous article, the support and maintenance of your system after an upgrade is critical.

Upon completion of a support agreement with KBWEB Consult, we will actively monitor your AEM system for early signs of issues, perform regular system health checks, and implement updates and security patches according to Adobe’s best practices.

Let us manage, and reduce, the complexity of AEM upgrades

As Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie famously observed in 2005, “Complexity kills.” Everyone in technology must make their best efforts to reduce complexity.

KBWEB Consult’s staff offers dedication and experience to not only implement your system, but to implement your system correctly with a minimum of complexity.

Talk to us about our AEM Resurgence offering to revitalize your system: https://calendly.com/krassimir-boyanov/30min