Digital Plunge - have you already taken the plunge?

Users are contributing content more than ever before, and it's getting difficult for Enterprise systems to manage it. To cope up with this, Adobe keeps evolving their UGC ecosystem. I think it was called  Social Collaboration tool  before CQ 5.5 After CQ 5.5 it was called  Social Communities  (So-Co),  this was shortened to So-Co. With AEM 6, this was rebranded as AEM Communities. At that point, all UGC components functionality was moved into Communities from AEM. So forums, comments/ratings etc. With 6.2, the concept of a central store was introduced, so content was saved outside of AEM in a central location where all instances would read and write, this can be Mongo, or JCR (but only for single instances) or it can be cloud storage (better name than social storage) which as you know carries a cost. And then Adobe overtook another product named Livefyre which is managed comments and other UGC content in a SAAS ki

Recently I worked on one of the major enterprise project in Adobe for upgrading AEM from 5.6.1 to 6.2. It took me and my team almost 10 months to upgrade this enterprise system, due to the complexity of the project. After working on multiple upgrade projects on AEM now, I feel that even though Adobe documentation does provide lots of help, but there is still a huge difference in plan, timelines (may vary from 4 weeks to 10 months), and execution for each project (completely depends on the current architecture and topologies). I am trying to consolidate my experience and learnings on these projects in my blog. Hope it will be helpful for some of you planning for AEM upgrade I will cover each phase separately as below Kickoff, Planning & estimation Analysis/assessment/discovery workshop Actual upgradation   Post upgrade Activities Performance tuning activities Go live & Cutover Maintenance activities