Common Questions

Our current public sites are hosted on SharePoint 2013 which ends its extended support period on April 11, 2023.  Microsoft has indicated to us that while we could use SharePoint 2019 on-prem, they are not putting any efforts into the public webserver portion of the product and are refocusing efforts on its collaboration side.  This means any enhancements for websites would require significant expenditures of State resources and be unsupported directly from the vendor.  Knowing this, DoIT created a committee several years ago to evaluate best-in-class web content management systems which were enterprise focused and could support our diverse needs. 

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is one of the consistent leaders in the WCM space and was internally decided to be one of the most capable platforms which could be chosen as a successor to SharePoint.  With its focus on the public facing website, it outperforms that singular function better than our current SharePoint product which was trying to be both collaboration and an anonymous website platform.  AEM proves that dedicating the resources in one direction of development and purpose for the software yields greater results.  With an extremely easy to use interface it makes typical web editing a drag-and-drop experience and we’re able to extend the platform to meet our stringent requirements on accessibility and mobile first strategy. 

Taking the platform and extending it to be an enterprise solution specific to Illinois agencies has been DoIT’s mission since starting this initiative in 2020 and we think everyone will be happy with the tooling and technology we have available.  See #8 for more information about where you can learn about the platform tools and training. 

As you can imagine, DoIT has an impressive inventory of sites under our current platform and with the quickly approaching end of life for SharePoint 2013 we are working diligently to move sites as quickly yet efficiently as possible.  The exact calendar for agencies is still in flux as we finalize our granular migration steps, general migration steps can be seen in the attachment.  We appreciate your patience as we finalize our migration calendar, and we aim to give agencies as much notice as possible for their engagement. 

As of this writing there are 12 sites on the AEM platform, and we are adding more.  Any new websites being requested are automatically going into the AEM platform, additionally as staffing allows, we are migrating “micro” and “initiative” sites while we wait for our vendor partner to be procured. Here's the list of AEM sites that's currently available to the public. 

Your role as either a business owner or a technical owner of the site will be critical during the migration planning, content review and ultimately the go-live and subsequent running of the site.  I won’t go into the details of everything but below are just the high-level expectations of what’s going to be needed from you during each phase: 

• Migration Planning: We need you to help identify any sections of the website which DO NOT need to be migrated.  This is content which is outdated or redundant and can just be dropped.  We also need you to help identify any functional areas of the website which would have integrations with other systems or are more than just text and/or graphics.  These will be later mapped to their equivalent functional element in our AEM platform to ensure we match your site needs. 
  
• Content Review: After the initial content migration you will be asked to coordinate the content review of your site to ensure that content was migrated correctly from your existing SP2013 site into the new platform.  Because data migration is never 100%, we expect a small number of issues and are asking the agencies, who know their content best, to assist us with verifying the information is correct in both content and structure on the site.  During this migration we are NOT redesigning or rearchitecting websites.  Given the amount of work we have within this year we are performing a pure platform shift of sites, not redesigns.  We will have a subsequent phase where agencies can request redesign work after all sites have been moved over. 
  
• Go-Live and running: During go-live you will need to ensure users inside the agency are aware of the site move and that any call centers or help lines have the correct URLs to give clients.  After go-live the maintenance of the site will return to your internal direct agency or agency-based DoIT authors.  DoIT core WCM will provide technical support and author training on the platform prior to handoff and will remain available as always. 
  

Migration will begin with a kick-off meeting and migration strategy alignment; from there we will be fully transparent about our timeline for your project and keep everyone aware of progress and any risks or issues encountered.  The goal is to move efficiently and effectively through the process, this will be a repeated pattern for each agency.  You can reference this presentation for a high-level overview of the process, but a more detailed plan will be given during the kick-off and after the analysis and feature mapping exercises are completed. 

We will be creating the site on AEM while your production SharePoint 2013 site is live, so you will need to track changes and those changes will need to be replicated on the AEM site prior to it going live.  We typically refer to this as the “true-up” period which occurs in the week or two prior to go-live.  This is also when most authors get the most practical experience in the platform, we use it as hands on training with daily office-hours for support on issues. 

Yes. Agencies have long asked to leverage their vanity domain names for their websites and so while establishing this platform we did so with that as a design decision.  An example is below to illustrate the change. 

If your agency does not currently have a illinois.gov based subdomain, we will work with your agency to assign a proper subdomain name for your website. During the go-live process we place redirects in place to direct traffic from your existing SharePoint 2013 site to your new subdomain URL.  The details of this redirect are explained below.

The beginning of your website address isn’t the only thing changing on your site.  During the migration we also need to change the structure of your pages and documents so there’s almost no chance your existing redirects or user bookmarks will still work without having redirect handling of some sort. However, we don’t want to go crazy and create mapping for every page because that isn’t the normal behavior for the internet.  It’s expected that sites change, and bookmarks aren’t valid forever. During the “Migration Planning” phase of your engagement we will ask you to identify your “CRITICAL” URLs.   

These are URLs which are in print or are URLs baked into applications which would be extremely difficult to change. Beyond those identify as difficult or impossible to change, we would suggest possibly the top 2 levels of your navigation OR any direct-to-consumer landing pages you have advertised. We will need these identified URLs to be entered on an excel document so that we can create a mapping document between the old SP2013 URL and the new URL under AEM.  We will then enter them into our redirect solution and users going to those links will end up in the new location. Additional redirects will be able to be added and maintained by your agency webmasters post go-live should something be missed, but the goal is to identify and proactively have those “CRITICAL” entries during launch.  A catch-all rule will be placed in SharePoint 2013 so that any request to your SharePoint site after go-live which is not handled by a specific redirect will send the visitor to your new homepage so users are not provided with dated material or a error page.

DoIT will be having author training for anyone who will be interacting with the platform as we onboard agencies. We have already completed several author classes and are continuing to refine the virtual training class and our supplemental training materials.  In addition to the Webex training classes we are holding we are also creating a series of video tutorials AND have an online user guide which not only covers all the components within AEM, but also has articles with guidelines on accessibility, authoring tips and tricks and information on our supplemental tools to create the perfect site. The author guide has been created as a central repository for everything related to authoring your website, so the information is presented in a clear, concise and flexible manner.  You can check out the author guide and our current videos by visiting WCMAuthorGuide.illinois.gov.

Finally, as part of the AEM initiative we are resurrecting the Webmaster roundtable.  Each agency will have the opportunity to contribute a representative (DoIT or business unit based) to the roundtable. This group will be an opportunity to exchange knowledge and experiences between agencies, but also will be voicing the needs of the strategic visions and future needs of the agencies to help DoIT Web Content stay informed and thereby target module enhancements and development to make the most benefit for partner agencies while still keeping an enterprise vision. 

If you’re coming from our SharePoint 2013 platform the answer is likely a simple yes and then some. If you’re a new site or a site being migrated from a different platform then the answer isn’t as simple.  The DoIT AEM Platform gives authors the ability to quickly and efficiently publish and manage public facing content. It is NOT a development platform for custom code or designed to fit specific needs of a specific agency.  At DoIT we think and build bigger than a single agency and as such the components within AEM have been designed for the widest range of uses and agency purposes. 

Example: 

• The need: You need to show a map of intake locations for your agency on the web. 
  
• A traditional answer: You create an ASP.NET, PHP or Java page which calls into a database directly and then uses a Jquery or Javascript library to map those points onto the page when a visitor views the page. 
  
• The downfall: This isn’t reusable or enterprise thinking.  It’s single purpose and if there is later a list of a different type of location then you’re recreating your “traditional answer” and you’ve now got two sets of code to manage if something needs updated or a flaw is found. You’ve also now mixed the purposes of your website, is it a website or an application? Having this condition can make upgrading harder in the future. 
  
• The DoIT enterprise approach: Build a mapping module that takes in a locations file or connects to a webservice which returns a json payload of locations and related information. This way the rendering code is centralized, reusable, and if updates need to occur then they are performed in one place. A bonus is that DoIT will handle and verify all the accessibility and security compliance concerns. 
  

Currently, we are only concentrating on the SharePoint 2013 sites and moving those first.  However, we do want to know about any other public sites hosted at vendor locations or within agencies which are anonymous public sites.  Web Content Management has been reaching out to CIOs and Webmasters gathering this list within the last few weeks to update our records.  Once the initial platform shift is completed, we will be happy to discuss any other site onboarding needs your agency may have and how they can be requested and scheduled.