Upgrade to Aurora with iTalent’s strategic road map and playbook
Thisnew versionpromises many benefits, including improved user experience and deeper analytics that empower businesses to nurture their online communities. Amid these advancements, iTalent Digitalemergesas 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 hownumerousor complex your existing customizations are. In this article, we provide an overview of the key components of ourmethodology, 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 todeterminethe 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 ourinitialassessment and a comprehensive understanding of the community'sobjectives, 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 itonAurora. This entails three key phases: preparation,executionand launch. PREPARATION: We begin byidentifyingthe core features you will need in Aurora, for example, interaction styles, locales, case portals, and the like. Another important step is a thorough mapping ofall ofthe customizations you need to keep in Aurora, along with detailed descriptions.Beyond thecomponentlist 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’stime 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 decreasestotalcost of ownership as well asfacilitatesadoption 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 bearchived.It’sworth 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 extensionsidentified,mappedand categorized,it’stime 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 repliesdon’tcarry 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,reconfiguredor rebuilt in order to function correctly on Aurora. Developer Experience: If required, we set upthe DeveloperExperience, 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 updatepathsas necessary. Theme and page builder: Aurora offers an easy-to-use theme and page builder that allows a wide range of colors,fontsand design styles. We recreate the look and feel of your Classic communityonAurora. 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 notcustomizableand you cannot import your own CSS. Admin & settings: We carry over the community structure, ranks, roles, permissions, badging and other settings, adjusting as necessary foroptimalperformance on Aurora. We also review the SSO settings and carry them over, whether they be self-service SAML, OAuth2 orKhorosSSO. LAUNCH: With that,you’reoff to the races and fully operational on Aurora, poised to reap its benefits. Get more details about the key advancements that Aurora offers.Key Differences Between Khoros Classic and Aurora
By contrast, Aurora, Khoros's new community platform offering, offers improved functionality and increased configurability out of the box, rendering many common types of Classic customizations unnecessary. Here’s how Aurora changes the game: Configuration over Customization: With Aurora, the focus is on configuring all aspects of your community through a simplified Admin interface rather than customizing core functionality using a wide array of customization points. You can still extend the platform in ways which bring business value if you have access to development resources, but these extensions are built around the edges, enhancing functionality without disrupting the foundation. Aurora encourages you to use the core product the way it was designed. This means the platform remains stable and consistent, and updates and new features can be picked up automatically with little to no adjustment to custom code required. Styling and User Interface: For those who have experience customizing the look and feel in Classic, a common question during their first foray into Aurora is, “Where do I put my CSS”? Unlike Classic, Aurora doesn’t provide a global stylesheet to be overridden. Instead, customization of the look and feel is handled through a theme tool backed by style variables that abstract the style of the community. This helps ensure that core platform updates won’t break your custom themes. The Theme tool makes branding your community a snap! Aurora also provides a Page Builder tool for easy drag-and-drop configuration of your community layout and pages. This is also where your navbar is configured, and in contrast to Classic, you have complete control over the mix of internal and external links you want to include. Page Builder also makes it easy to override your pages for specific categories or boards, a feature that was a lot less intuitive and click-heavy in Classic. Enhanced Default Features: Here are some examples of configurable out-of-the-box features provided by Aurora that Classic lacked and required customization to achieve: Message Lists: One of the oldest features in Classic but also the most commonly customized, as every change to sorting, filtering, or visible columns, or replacing pagination with “load more” functionality required building a custom message list from scratch – and sorting and filtering options were pretty limited in many cases. Aurora offers more modern and configurable out-of-the-box functionality for message lists, reducing the need for complex custom rewrites. Wayfinding/Navigation Tiles: Another common customization, visual navigation via wayfinding or navigation tiles, which had to be custom-built in Classic, are readily available and easily configurable in Aurora. This feature enhances the user experience by providing intuitive and visually appealing navigation paths within the community. Featured Content:Aurora allows you to easily feature whatever content you like wherever you like in your community. While Classic has built-in featured content components, the lack of fine control over their content and placement was a common target for customization. HTML Components:Classic offers “Custom Content Blocks”, which are confusing and error-prone to create and maintain using only a plain text editor. It requires a customization to add more than ten variations and another customization to give them useful names and descriptions in the Classic Admin interface. Aurora offers HTML Components instead, which can be conveniently created directly in Page Builder using a rich text editor and added to pages as desired. Fire Hose (Coming Soon*): Complex integrations and event-handling in Classic usually required code-enabled plugins built by Khoros Professional Services or polling and processing Khoros data via a combination of API calls and huge daily bulk data files. Aurora will put the power in your hands and streamline the process when it introduces its new “fire hose” feature, a dynamic feed of all community actions and events to which webhooks can be added. This will allow customer dev teams and their partners to build some really powerful extensions and integrations. (*This functionality is on the roadmap for later in 2024.) By moving to Aurora, Khoros is addressing many of the challenges faced by users of Classic, offering a platform that is easier to manage and more aligned with modern web standards and user expectations. This transition is not just about new features; it’s about simplifying the user and administrator experience, minimizing tech debt and long-term cost of ownership, and enhancing overall community engagement. Whether you're looking to build from scratch or transition from Classic, Aurora presents a compelling case for a smoother, more sustainable community platform. Simplify the transition with iTalent Digital At iTalent Digital, we understand that transitioning to a new platform can seem daunting. However, our team is here to ensure that your move to Aurora is smooth, efficient, and tailored to your business’s unique needs. Our comprehensive support includes strategic planning, customization guidance, and ongoing optimization to ensure Aurora meets and exceeds your community engagement objectives. Contact us at khoros@italentdigital.com to book a free consultation and discover how iTalent can help you upgrade to Aurora.
