ektron to digital experience cloud: a guide to moving up - episerver · 2018-06-29 · episerver...

Ektron to Digital Experience Cloud:A guide to moving up

Ektron to Digital Experience CloudEpiserver

Join the hundreds of associations, global brands, banks, insurers, public sector entities, and healthcare, higher education, and non-profit institutes that have already moved to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud

Building on the robust and modern foundation of Episerver, we

have added Ektron’s most powerful and useful features including

the Digital Experience Hub™ (DXH), a new architectural approach

to eSync and Instant Templates Introduction.

In the converged platform, you will also find Episerver’s user-

friendly and super productive one-screen interface, where

marketers, merchandisers, and content authors can intuitively

and efficiently work and collaborate around content, products,

assets, and layout – all in one place.


Benefits of moving from Ektron to the converged Digital Experience Cloud platform

1. Deliver the Most Relevant Message to the Right Visitor at the Right Time - Episerver’s ubiquitous,

easy-to-deliver personalization functionality makes it easy to determine your visitor’s intent, and deliver

targeted messages based on where they are in their customer journey.

2. Your Editorial Calendar at your Fingertips - Take control of your campaigns, product launches, and other

widespread content updates with Episerver Projects. Plan your upcoming campaigns, create, update,

or upload your content, and watch each go live on your schedule with Episerver’s new eSync solution:

Projects.

3. Deliver Search-Driven Experiences - Ektron encouraged our clients to use search for richer and more

relevant visitor experiences and Episerver delivers the search tool that makes it easier for business users

to do just that. Episerver’s Personalized Find automatically optimizes search results, boosting the most

relevant results to the top for each unique visitor.

4. Commerce in the Cloud - More companies in every industry are finding ways to monetize their content.

Whether what you sell is physical, digital, or even event-based, you can merchandise in the cloud

seamlessly with your already valuable content under a single, discoverable editorial interface with

Episerver CMS+Commerce.

5. Future-Proof your Content and your CMS - Episerver is built with flexibility in mind. Take your Episerver

CMS-managed, well-structured content and deliver it to native apps, kiosks, or even other sites and

single-page applications. In addition, Episerver Digital Experience Hub™ boasts pre-built and tested

integrations with industry-leading CRM and Marketing Automation systems.


Preparing to Move

Moving from Ektron up to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ can be exciting. As you make this step

forward in your digital technology, it may help to understand your organizational goals, budget, and current

resources. Our experienced team of Episerver Account Managers can help you every step of the way in

determining and understanding:

• Your Business Objectives – What strategic goals can Episerver solutions help you achieve for your

business?

• Your Right-Sized Budget – What tools and solutions does your business need in order to meet your goals?

What can you do now and what makes sense to deliver later?

• Your Current Assets – We want to help you protect your current efforts in content, SEO, and integrations

with relevant systems. What impact will these assets have on the move to the Episerver Digital

Experience Cloud™ and what can we do to make sure the value of these are preserved?

Moving Business Forward

Ektron customers move up to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ for many compelling reasons and,

usually, the effort is associated with strategic business goals whether they be to reduce costs or increase

conversions, etc. For example, your business may benefit from:

1. Increased conversions – By delivering an optimized experience and by using the current visitor’s context

to deliver relevant, targeted messaging.

2. Increased sales – By taking more business online and adding Episerver Commerce to your current online

offering.

3. Improved operational efficiency – With an easier-to-use, flexible, and discoverable authoring experience

that helps you manage distributed authoring with granular access controls, well-defined content

structures, and improved content and layout management tools.

4. Reduce overhead while improving reliability – by delivering your online experiences through Episerver

Digital Experience Cloud™ backed by Microsoft Azure™ - an industry-leading cloud provider.

An open dialog with your Episerver Account Manager about your business needs will help determine which

Episerver solution is going to go furthest in delivering meaningful results and ROI for your organization.


Working To Your Budget

Since the merger with Ektron, Episerver’s product suite has grown dramatically to offer you the best tools

under a single solution.

• Episerver CMS - A market-leading CMS loved by editors and developers

• Episerver Commerce - A unified digital commerce platform

• Episerver Find - Enterprise search that can dynamically build landing pages

• Episerver Personalized Find - Search results based on real-time behavior

• Episerver Campaign - Omnichannel marketing automation powered by AI

• Episerver Perform - Personalize product recommendations and offers using AI

• Episerver Reach - Personalize and trigger emails based on behavioral data

• Episerver Insight - Automatically capture and analyze visitor data

• Episerver Advance - AI-powered personalization for content

• Episerver Social - Engaging user-generated content

Ektron, though a capable platform, only offers a fraction of the capabilities available from Episerver to help

you deliver rich and relevant online experiences. While you may reach the limit of truly beneficial functionality

with Ektron, the growth and offering of the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ offers the assurance that you

can continue to grow your business online far beyond base CMS capabilities.

You can work with your Episerver Account Manager to determine which bundle of Episerver solutions will best

meet your business needs and which represent future growth opportunities as you continue to deliver more

value online.


Steps for Success

Working with Your Content & Resources

Moving up to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ will introduce opportunities for content restructuring

and governance to help you deliver consistent, quality information across all channels. These changes will

bring your site into modern best practices and will bring greater versatility and opportunity into the core

platform, equipping you and your team to tackle the challenges of the modern Marketing and IT worlds.

Establishing a Content Inventory

Upgrades to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ are often predicated by the need for a redesign, making

it an opportune time to perform a content audit and content migration project plan as part of developing

and refining your online presence. Episerver partners as well as Episerver Expert Services can help you

strategically audit the content for continuing viability, create a content migration project plan that addresses

the complexity of moving content, content relationships, an understanding of content usage and reuse and

quality assurance test plans to ensure the content has been moved according to plan. In addition, a content

audit in collaboration with a partner can uncover opportunities to restructure and repurpose your content in

order to facilitate greater opportunity for delivering it across multiple channels – future-proofing your content

toward a changing marketing landscape.

Preserving SEO

Link preservation is a top priority for any project involving a shift in the supporting platform. Even if a site is

not focused on marketing, for which SEO is always a top concern, high-utility applications, such as those

common in B2B and portals, often have pages that are bookmarked by the end user. This, however, does

not imply that the resource URLs should remain unchanged, particularly when there is an opportunity for

them to be more human-readable, more consistently formed, and applied with better adherence to current

standards.

All of these aid in the predictability and discoverability of any given resource and provide a boost to SEO by

having the “content” of the URL match that of the resource.

Working with an Episerver partner or Episerver Expert Services can aide you in planning and URL

management, as well as tool and resource selection, to ensure preservation of SEO throughout the transition

from Ektron to Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™.

Maintaining Meaningful Connections

Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ is developed as a best-of-breed platform with interoperability with other

systems as a guiding principal in the product from an architectural and extensibility standpoint. As such, the

Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ and all of the products therein are built to work well with your current

systems with the ability to share data in both directions for customer data and event collection and targeting

of content based on lead or account data in your existing systems via Episerver’s Digital Experience Hub™.


Episerver’s interoperability with other applications means you can continue using the systems that work well

for your current needs while ensuring consistent experience delivery across all channels.

Migrating Content

There are 3 general approaches to performing content migration:

1. Monolithic approach

2. Segmented approach

3. Sequenced approach

In the Monolithic approach all content migration work is scheduled for the end of the project, starting at

a point when the development activity is in final testing. This is the most efficient approach, requiring the

least overhead in terms of coordination between the site developer and Episerver. The primary risk is if any

problems are found in the models and/or mappings reworking them may jeopardize a short content migration

timeline. This risk can be mitigated by including an advisory activity which helps insure there will be no

surprises during content migration in terms of model/mapping roadblocks.

In the Segmented approach content

migration begins earlier in the project,

and overlaps the content with the site

development work. This is achieved by

subdividing the site into self-contained

‘segments’, and migrating each segment

as soon as the development for the

segment is complete. This approach

can be useful in cases where there are

truly independent segments, such as in a

multi-site migration. In those cases, this

approach may result in a shorter elapsed

time between the final completion of

development and the completion of

all content migration. However, the

approach requires additional overall

effort due to the high degree of planning/

coordination required between the site developers and Episerver, and the need for the site developers to

support content migration QA work in parallel with ongoing development.

The Sequenced approach is based on a carefully planned sequencing of the object types being developed/

migrated. In this approach the content migration activities still begin earlier in the project, but all final

migration is delayed and performed after development is complete. This approach is most useful for large,

complex sites which have large numbers of object types to be migrated. In that situation, the extra overhead

required for coordination between the site developers and Episerver and the increased content migration QA

time is used to mitigate the risk of model/mapping surprises and rework late in the project. In addition, the

elapsed time from the completion of development to the completion of content migration is decreased.

Example Ektron to Episerver project plan


Customer Sucesses

Shangri-La Hotels

Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts is a Hong Kong-based multinational hospitality company with five-star luxury

lodgings available in Asia, the Middle East, Canada, Oceania and Europe. A customer since 2007, Shangri-La

moved up from Ektron to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud for CMS and digital marketing in 2016. This

move allowed them to support 11 million page views per month, with 5 websites migrated in 18 months. The

move saw an increase in traffic by 10% year over year.

American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)

ASRM had been using the Ektron CMS to manage the content on their site for years, but it had been some

time since the Society had implemented any upgrades or made any enhancements to either its member

site or patient portal. By the time Rusty Howell, Director of IT, joined the team in March of 2016, it was evident

that a lot could be improved to help the organization better manage its extremely content-heavy websites.

The Society had fallen behind in a digital world and needed to rethink its web strategy in regards to mobile

responsivity.

“Ektron scaled well for us, but Episerver does a better job and integrates seamlessly with our Personify AMS,”

said Rusty. “It doesn’t require a costly plug-in or bridge. It just works.”

The ASRM team began seeing a return on investment in just one business quarter, with internal efficiency

improving by leaps and bounds. Employees prefer the more intuitive Episerver interface over their old Ektron

UI, and have found it easier to train non-technical staff to use the CMS. Editors are also appreciative of the

shortcuts Episerver offers including Paste from Word and the ability to move html pages and assets around

as needed.

Houston Grand Opera

In pursuit of a wider, larger and younger audience, the Houston Grand Opera sought to tap into the channels

where its audiences already were congregating –social media. The idea was to leverage that social content

in the form of posts on Instagram, You Tube, Facebook and Twitter by having the site mine content in various

hashtag campaigns and offer it up on the public website as viral social content. This created a ‘You at the

Opera’ feature on the site that let would be patrons see that the art form was not formal, but rather informal,

fun, young, accessible and lively.

Building from that primary goal, they redesigned the website for a more modern and sophisticated feel,

providing easier site usability and promoting greater ticket sales through iMedia’s Select Your Own Seat

technology and its integration with Tessitura.

With four key audience member persona groups, the Opera was looking for a way to tailor content to Single


Ticket Buyers, Subscribers, Community Members, and Opera Studio Members. So being able to leverage

Episerver personalization across all portions of the site was key. And of course in a real time ticketing

eCommerce site with a fixed number of seats in the house, being able to sell tickets, who’s pricing and

availability is personalized required an extensive customization and integration into Tessitura.

Through our integrations they have complete control over every single screen of the entire site and can

rapidly sell new seasons tickets through import tools. They can create new hashtag campaigns and mine

social content through iMedia’s Social Wall technology and can personalize the entire website experience for

all its patrons. Through our design, the confidence in the brand has soared, and the metrics show that the

site is more usable, useful, and is generating more traffic, sales, and retention.

The results for Houston Grand Opera were instant with an increase of 100% in page views since the launch

and 7% increase in web orders in the first month after launch.

About Episerver

Episerver empowers digital leaders to easily create standout experiences for customers – everywhere

they engage, and always with measurable business results. The Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™

unifies digital content, commerce and marketing in one platform, including omnichannel solutions for

smart personalization and intelligent campaigns. Founded in 1994, Episerver has offices in the US, UK,

Sweden, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa,

Singapore, Vietnam and the UAE.

For more information, visit episerver.com.

www.episerver.com

FAQ

Is the upgrade to the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ automated?

The converged platform offers Ektron customers many advantages and new features that neither Ektron nor

Episerver customers had before. Because of this, we are unable to offer a completely automated upgrade

mechanism. Instead, we have put together a package of partner services including tools and Expert Services

accelerators to help your partner facilitate and simplify the move.

How will Episerver protect my prior investment in Ektron?

A customer’s existing investment is always taken in to consideration. Cost will vary depending on your needs

and other interests for your new digital strategy. For more information about the cost of the move, please

contact your dedicated Episerver Account Manager today. Assistance is also available to help with cost

justification based on your project, new requirements, and strategic goals.

Can you recommend a partner with expertise in both platforms?

Ektron partners have rapidly come up to speed on the new platform. If you are currently working with a

partner, ask them about their experience with the Digital Experience Cloud and how they can help you move

up to the latest release. Otherwise contact your dedicated Episerver Account Manager today and they’ll work

with you to help understand the value and the different steps involved for your organisation.

ektron to digital experience cloud: a guide to moving up - episerver · 2018-06-29 · episerver...

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