Upgrading

From the developer’s perspective, upgrading a site from document-based authoring (SharePoint or Google Drive) to Experience Workspace is a low-complexity task. However there are some differences to keep in mind when upgrading as well as features to consider in Experience Workspace.

This document focuses on technical aspects of upgrading a site to Experience Workspace. For an overview of migration strategies and suggestions, please see the administrator’s upgrade guide.

Keep in mind

1. Protecting authoring - By default, your content is public on Experience Workspace. You will be prompted to secure your sandbox.
2. Protecting publishing - By default, previewing and publishing is public on Experience Workspace. You can use tools.aem.live to enable authentication for previewing and publishing.
3. Sidekick - If coming from AEM authoring, you may need to remove any legacy edit parameters in your Sidekick config.
4. Assets - Enabling AEM Assets requires an AEMaaCS instance.
5. Delivery HTML - Experience Workspace and AEM authoring introduce an extra paragraph tag when a list is nested inside another list. You can reach out to the Edge Delivery team to change this behavior using a feature flag.
6. Delivery - There are several differences in media publishing support and their related limits.
7. Query index / Sitemap - You no longer need to maintain a sheet for query indexes and sitemaps.
   1. These are now kept internal. You turn on your query indexes using a helix-query.yaml file (or in config bus yaml) YAML index docs.
   2. Indexes that are not sheet-based (ie. Experience Workspace / AEM authoring / etc.) will be strongly typed. If you have code that expects strings for things like arrays, keep this in mind.
8. Configurations - Experience Workspace has configs (gear icon in breadcrumb) and Edge Delivery has configs (config bus or .helix/config). They both have different use cases.
   1. Experience Workspace Config - Used for Experience Workspace permissions and Experience Workspace feature flagging
   2. Edge Delivery Config - Used for CDN info, preview and publish permissions, api keys, etc.
9. Spreadsheets - Experience Workspace’s supports approximately 5,000 rows.
   1. If you believe your project has complex sheet needs such as conditional formatting, formulas, more than 5000 rows, please use Edge Delivery's content overlay feature (see below)
10. Spreadsheets - Edge Delivery Services does not accept a named single sheet from Experience Workspace.
    1. If you use named single sheets, we recommend adding another empty sheet or adjusting your code.
11. Dot folders are hidden - Folders like /.helix , /.trash or /.da are hidden from the list view. You must enter these paths in using your browser's URL bar. This is to reduce accidental changes to important configuration files.

Identity and protecting content

Experience Workspace uses Adobe identity management service (IMS). If you are a part of an organization, you are encouraged to use your org and groups to protect your content. If you do not have an organization, or prefer to use email addresses, you can also do so.

Please see the Permissions and security documentation for details.

Content overlay

Below is the Config Bus content object you can use to overlay SharePoint / Google Drive with Experience Workspace. This will allow you to seamlessly blend Excel sheets with your Experience Workspace data.

fstab (JSON)

"content": {
    "source": {
      "url": "https://adobe.sharepoint.com/:f:/r/sites/adobecom/DA%20Docs/da-bacom",
      "type": "onedrive"
    },
    "overlay": {
      "type": "markup",
      "url": "https://content.da.live/adobecom/da-bacom/"
    }
  }

Upgrade strategies

This document focuses on technical aspects of upgrading a site to Experience Workspace. For an overview of migration strategies and suggestions, please see the administrator’s upgrade guide.