Upgrade to Aurora with iTalent’s strategic road map and playbook
Khoros recently launched Aurora, its next-generation customer engagement platform. Aurora enables companies to build, integrate and customize their digital communities easier and faster than ever, all with fewer resources.
This new version promises many benefits, including improved user experience and deeper analytics that empower businesses to nurture their online communities.
Amid these advancements, iTalent Digital emerges as a premier technology partner for businesses embarking on their journey with Aurora. iTalent Digital leverages its deep experience with Khoros to customize and extend the platform while ensuring clients harness the full potential of Aurora.
With our proprietary Aurora upgrade road map and playbook, iTalent Digital will ensure a smooth and successful transition from Khoros classic to Aurora, no matter how numerous or complex your existing customizations are.
In this article, we provide an overview of the key components of our methodology, based on decades of combined experience as a premium Khoros partner.
Step 1: Customizations assessment
The process begins with the iTalent Digital’s proprietary customizations assessment that provides an overview of customizations and extensions, associates files with functionality, and examines each customization to determine the best way to enable its features in Aurora.
Step 2: Aurora road map
The road map provides a timeline with key milestones to guide the transition. Based on the results from our initial assessment and a comprehensive understanding of the community's objectives, user engagement strategies, and operational needs, iTalent Digital outlines a high-level strategic document for ensuring a smooth transition to Aurora within given time and resource constraints.
Step 3: Aurora playbook
The Aurora play book provides a detailed plan for preparing your community and launching it on Aurora. This entails three key phases: preparation, execution and launch.
PREPARATION:
We begin by identifying the core features you will need in Aurora, for example, interaction styles, locales, case portals, and the like.
Another important step is a thorough mapping of all of the customizations you need to keep in Aurora, along with detailed descriptions. Beyond the component list generated from the ARC, we include other customizations analyzed through our extended assessment as well as any new customizations that may have gone live since then.
Next, it’s time to make some decisions based on the community’s vision and strategic priorities as defined in the road map, and categorize each customization and platform extension into one of four buckets:
- Remove
- Nice to have
- Essential
- Already included in Aurora out of the box
You will be pleased to discover that a lot of your existing customizations are likely to be already included in Aurora out of the box (OOB). This decreases total cost of ownership as well as facilitates adoption of Aurora.
Content clean-up:
Transitioning to Aurora is a good opportunity to take a fresh look at your community content and consider what is still relevant and what needs to be archived. It’s worth taking the time to think about what can be simplified or otherwise tidied up before transitioning over to your sparkling new Aurora community.
EXECUTION:
Data and content conformity
Once we have the content, customizations and extensions identified, mapped and categorized, it’s time to conform all the data and functionality to the new platform. For example, Tags and Labels in Aurora act more like Labels in Classic. Tags only exist on root posts in Aurora, which means Classic Tags on replies don’t carry forward.
Upgrade, not migration: Keep in mind that Aurora sits on top of your Khoros community’s existing database, so no migration of the underlying data is necessary.
Customizations:
Some customizations may need to be conformed, reconfigured or rebuilt in order to function correctly on Aurora.
Developer Experience:
If required, we set up the Developer Experience, including the Aurora SDK (software development kit) and Dev Tools, then rebuild or reconfigure the customizations that use it. We conduct a review of all integrations and update paths as necessary.
Theme and page builder:
Aurora offers an easy-to-use theme and page builder that allows a wide range of colors, fonts and design styles. We recreate the look and feel of your Classic community on Aurora. Depending on the customizations that were applied to your Classic community, a 100% exact match may not be possible. With Aurora, the CSS code is not customizable and you cannot import your own CSS.
Admin & settings:
We carry over the community structure, ranks, roles, permissions, badging and other settings, adjusting as necessary for optimal performance on Aurora.
We also review the SSO settings and carry them over, whether they be self-service SAML, OAuth2 or KhorosSSO.
LAUNCH:
With that, you’re off to the races and fully operational on Aurora, poised to reap its benefits. Get more details about the key advancements that Aurora offers.