Getting Started

What is Aurora?

"Aurora is a game-changing update to the industry-leading Khoros Communities solution, with a set of transformative capabilities that make it easier to deliver an exceptional member experience." 

Aurora is the major upgrade for Khoros Communities (Classic). First released officially on July 31st, 2023, Aurora is a total transformation of our top-notch community platform. We've completely revamped it, utilizing cutting-edge technologies and adopting a modern headless architecture. We have intentionally bolstered Aurora with powerful APIs that provide flexibility and robustness. From the very beginning, we've focused on creating an exceptional user experience, designing it with mobile-friendliness, performance, SEO, and accessibility in mind. It's a fresh start with a foundation built for the future of online communities.

Jump to Features.

Discovery: Am I ready for Aurora?

The first step is to determine your readiness for upgrading to Aurora. There is no rush to move from Classic as of 2024, so it is essential to review where you stand and what you need in order to upgrade successfully.

Secondly, it's good to remember that any change to your community presents an opportunity to revisit what success means and how your community experience supports success today and in the future. With this in mind, we encourage you to challenge yourself at each step of planning and ask, "How does this align to and support our business goals?"

Getting started

1. Understand Your Goals: While Aurora improves drastically upon the day-to-day community design, admin configuration, moderation, and end-user experience, in evaluating your readiness to upgrade to Aurora, ask yourself:

   • What are your plans for the community in the coming year? How do they align with your business goals & strategy?
   • Do you require certain features or integrations to support your community  strategy and day-to-day management? How do you use them?
   • Do you use SSO authentication? How does the authentication process work? (You may need to gather this information from the team that manages SSO at your organization.)
   • How long will it take to gather resources to help you in the upgrade to Aurora?

2. Evaluate Customizations: As a best practice, customizations should be limited to those where there is a clear business value and no alternative feature. With this in mind, we recommend you evaluate existing customizations in line with your community goals, and as part of your upgrade plan, consider your path to sunset any customizations you use today that do not provide measurable value to the community experience and its success. You may have custom features today (like widgets, special pages, etc.)—many of these can now be replaced with Aurora's built-in features. Where you can, we recommend switching to Aurora's features. It will not only save you the cost and effort to rewrite those components using new Aurora development tools but also help maintain your technical debt to that which is absolutely required. You can refer to the feature table on available features in Aurora. If you need help in this step, reach out to your development team, development partner, and/or your Khoros account team for assistance.

3. Scope Customizations: If upon completing evaluation of your existing customizations you identify key customizations you need to maintain when moving from Classic to Aurora, send a request to your Khoros account team to start the process on scoping the Aurora upgrade work and cost for updating your customizations.

4. Structure Changes: The community structure informs the user path through community and supports their ability to find content relevant to their need. As best practice it should be reviewed annually or whenever a change occurs in community or the business (e.g., redesign, product/service changes, etc.) Simply upgrading to Aurora takes your community structure, content, and members as is. As part of your upgrade planning, we recommend that you review the effectiveness of your structure in its current form, identify opportunities to improve, and plan to implement those changes. Structure changes can be made in advance of an upgrade. In fact, we highly recommend that you identify any opportunities to make these changes ahead of time—it can only positively impact the existing experience. If you would like structure changes to be included as part of your Aurora upgrade, this requires a migration to be added to your upgrade scope, which is an additional cost. Please review this need and communicate to your Khoros account team.
    

5. Consider Previewing Aurora: If you think you might be ready to upgrade to Aurora in the next few months, you can request a temporary Aurora Preview instance with your CSM. Read on for more info on Aurora Preview instance set up.

6. Engage with Khoros: If you have questions, please ask in this forum: Community Aurora Discussions

Aurora Upgrade Tasks Overview & Recommended Actions

When a community is upgraded to Aurora, automated tasks run in the background to ensure the data from Classic is now supported in Aurora. Here is a run-down on how that works:

Upgrade Process

Overview

During an Aurora upgrade project, you can expect these steps:

1. Customer Preparation: Use your temporary Aurora Preview environment to configure and design your community. You can request that Khoros import your existing stage admin settings (Structure, Roles/Permissions, and Ranks are supported) to this environment.

2. Upgrade Stage to Aurora: Once you kick off your project, your Stage environment is upgraded first, and Khoros moves your configurations over from your Aurora Preview environment. In this step, configure Stage with structure, ranks, designs, customizations, etc. Test and validate everything on this instance primarily. In this step, you no longer have access to your Aurora Preview instance.

   • Important Note: You are no longer able to use Studio Self-Publish after Stage is upgraded.

3. Testing Your Data in Aurora (optional): Khoros Services team sets up a special temporary environment for you to test your Aurora configurations & designs with a scrubbed (no PII) copy of your production data (with content & members). This step may not be available if you upgrade on your own or with a partner.

4. Final Validation and Launch: After testing and approvals, your Classic Production environment is upgraded to Aurora. Upgrade tasks are run in the background to make your data compatible with Aurora. In this step, you perform final validation and testing for go-live.

5. Completion and Cleanup: Once the upgrade is complete and validated, you have successfully upgraded to Aurora!

Aurora Preview Environments

Once you have an Aurora Preview instance set up, you can collaborate with your Khoros account team on steps you can take before your Aurora upgrade. We recommend starting to complete these tasks when you first gain access to your preview environment:

• Explore Aurora features and capabilities.
• Collect assets, style guide, and taxonomy from your brand.
• Once you have an admin account, begin to customize the look and feel using the Theme editor (colors, fonts, design).
• Set up the community structure and create test content as needed.
• Add badges & ranks, and adjust designs if necessary.
• Review and validate preset tags.
• Customize pages using the Page Templates builder (page layouts, widgets, text).
• Review roles and permissions, and test user access levels.
• Fine-tune miscellaneous settings such as Robots.txt and Content Settings.

We are confident that you will become comfortable with using Admin and Designer tools as you progress through this list, but feel free to leverage the Aurora educational material in Atlas: Getting Started in Aurora.

Features

Frequently Asked Questions

Am I able to migrate data into or within my community during an upgrade?

In the scenario where you need to migrate another community into your community, it is an option to engage with Khoros Services for migration during your Aurora upgrade project. Consult with your account team to discuss further and define your requirements.

Can I update my structure or do a re-structuring during my upgrade to Aurora?

When you upgrade your community to Aurora, it will upgrade it 1 to 1. There is no need for a migration map as the upgrade process is not a migration. All content, members, structure, and settings remain in place as your community is upgraded. This means that if you need to move content around in your structure or do a re-structuring during an Aurora upgrade, it is recommended that you do this prior to the Aurora upgrade. If your restructuring is extensive, it may require a migration, which will require scoping with Khoros and additional cost.

Will I retain access to Classic Community Analytics (also known as LSI - Lithium Social Intelligence)?

After you upgrade to Aurora, you will have access only to Aurora Analytics (metrics definitions can be found here). Though you will no longer have access to Classic Community Analytics dashboards, up to 2 years of historical data will be available in the Aurora Analytics Dashboard.

Also, Bulk Data API v3 is available in Aurora, so you will be able to continue usage of the API for your own internal analytics needs.