Aurora Upgrade Playbook
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 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 Task What happens in the upgrade? Required Actions for Khoros Customer Tags and Labels Tags and Labels both merge into "Tags" in Aurora. Similar to Labels in Classic, you can set pre-defined and freeform tags. Root-level labels and tags are carried forward as is, but reply-level tags are not. Pre-defined labels are carried forward and set in the Aurora admin as "pre-defined tags." If a particular Tag and Label have names identical to each other in Classic, these will merge into one collective tag in Aurora. Before Aurora upgrade, it is recommended (but optional) to clean up tags and labels as they will come over to Aurora as is when you upgrade your community. If you decide to clean up tags after the Aurora upgrade, you will still have the options to replace and remove tags. URL Redirects URLs to pages in Classic have 301 redirects automatically set to the corresponding pages in Aurora. None Images & Videos Images and videos are now associated with content in Aurora. Images and videos contained within galleries (and not attributed to content) will not be moved to Aurora, but all images and videos within content will be moved forward. User avatars are kept on the upgrade to Aurora. Any custom avatars collections in Assets within Studio are not moved forward into Aurora. If you plan to move forward your custom user avatars, save these assets. Once your stage community has upgraded to Aurora, upload your custom user avatars in Designer. Roles & Permissions All existing roles and permissions configurations will be moved forward to Aurora. None Community Settings (Nodes, Content, Users) All applicable community settings in Classic will be applied in Aurora automatically. Certain settings are not available in Aurora, so expect discrepancies between Classic and Aurora. None Ranks All ranks and existing criteria will be moved forward. The icons will not be moved forward, you will need to add icons back in Aurora. There are new options for visual styles in ranks for the customer to choose. Review ranks and set the new visual style for the ranks that you'd like after the upgrade. Badges All "live" badges and existing criteria and badge icons will be moved forward. Badges in the "Create" tab in Classic will not be moved forward. Badges will be unorganized and placed in a single set right after the upgrade. Badges can now be organized into "sets." Review badges and organize badges into newly created sets after the upgrade. Idea Statuses All predefined idea statuses are carried forward. Statuses will be unorganized and placed in a single set. Idea statuses can now be organized into "sets." Review idea statuses and organize them into newly created sets after the upgrade. Upgrade Process Overview During an Aurora upgrade project, you can expect these steps: 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 Feature Description Accessibility WCAG 2.1 AA VPAT (in progress) Admin & Permissions Content Features, Audit Logs, Roles & Permissions Analytics Dashboards, Reports, Bulk Data API, Analytics APIs Authentication Registration, Sign-In, MFA**, SSO (SAML, OAuth), Multi-Auth (multiple SSOs) Blogs Blog Posts, Content Workflow and Approval, Co-authoring & Contributors, Version History Developer Experience GraphQL APIs, SDK, GitHub, Metadata, Custom Components (Handlebars & React**), Endpoints, Custom Pages, Forms Events Events, Zoom Integration Follows & Notifications Follows, Notifications, Email Templates Forums, Threading & Comments Forums, Solutions, Replies, Comments, Likes, Deep Linking Gamification Ranks, Badges, Top Members Privacy Cookie Banner, Terms of Service, GDPR/CCPA Ideas Ideas, Statuses, Filtering, Reporting Inbox & Private Messaging Inbox, Private Messages, Broadcast KBs Articles, Content Workflow and Approval, Co-authoring & Contributors, Version History Localization** Localized Text, User/Node Settings, Navigation, Text Overrides, Localized Community Rich Media & Video Images, Videos Embed, Video Hosting/Streaming Message Editing & Posting RTE, Attachments, emojis, Embedly, Autosave Content Moderation Abuse/Content Reports, Spam Management, User Bans, Content Filters, Flood Controls, Moderation, DSA Site Structure & Navigation Community Structure, Header, Footer, Breadcrumbs, Hover Cards, Navigation Links, Featured Places & Content, Recent Top Content, Custom Text/HTML Designer Page Templates, Widgets, Theme Editor, Custom Fonts, Avatars, Design Language Elements Search Spotlight, Embedded Search, Auto-Suggest, Related Content SEO Page level SEO, Sitemap, Robots.txt Groups Groups (Open, Closed, Hidden), Group Membership SFDC Integration User Sync, Case Portal, Escalations Tags Preset, Freeform, Management of Tags, Tags Widgets User Profile & Settings User profile, settings **In development The improvements to community in Aurora help community managers easily manage the day-to-day community with low hassle, are more intuitive for building customizations in the community, and allow for greater extensibility to bring outside platforms closer to your Khoros community via integrations. To discover more, check out the following resources: Aurora 2024 Roadmap (Now, Next & Future) Getting Started in Aurora Aurora Release Notes Developer Documentation 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.4KViewsSign in to react to this post10CommentsAurora: Getting Started as a Site Designer
Welcome to Aurora! Aurora is Khoros’ re-imagined Community experience that leverages more than 20 years of experience and learnings in the digital community space. This introduction guides you through the most commonly used page template and theming tasks and provides links to the best articles for these tasks. Tip: Take a tour of Aurora in this 1-hour video training course, which will help you familiarize yourself with key Aurora features and concepts. Tip: Complete self-paced training that includes information about community design in the Khoros Academy Build Khoros Communities course. Let's get started! As a Site Designer, your primary responsibilities include: Creating and editing the theme of your site Designing the page templates used across your site Designing the templates used in email notifications (coming soon) As a Site Designer, you’ll spend much of your time in the Designer area. Note: To access the Designer area in the Khoros Community platform, you must have the Admin role (specifically, the Edit community settings permission grants access, but this permission also grants access to editing all parts of the community). Learn more about Roles and Permissions. Designer The Designer area is where you’ll perform most of your tasks. Go to Account Menu > Designer: In this area, you have access to: Theme Page Templates With these two areas, you’ll have the opportunity to design the look and feel of your entire community. Build your community’s theme The theme of your community encompasses your logo, the fonts, the colors, button and link formatting, avatars, and other UI elements across the site. Learn more about the Aurora Theme Editor. Design your community’s page templates There are many different page templates across the community that can be configured to create the desired look and feel that matches your brand. Page templates offer many different options for customization, such as navigation bar options, widgets, section organization, and more. To get started in designing your page templates, learn: about Page Templates how to use Page Templates how to create and arrange page sections on a Page Template how to configure the global Header & Footer about widgetsViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAurora: Getting Started as a Community Manager
Welcome to Aurora! Aurora is Khoros’ re-imagined Community experience that leverages more than 20 years of experience and learnings in the digital community space. This introduction guides you through the most commonly used features for common community management tasks and provides links to the best articles for these tasks. Tip: Take a tour of Aurora in this 1-hour video training course, which will help you familiarize yourself with key Aurora features and concepts. Let's get started! Community Managers often wear a variety of hats to develop and lead a community. Depending on how your team is organized, you could be responsible for one or more of the following: Working with senior stakeholders in the business to define a strategic plan for success for the community. This plan must align with the company's goals. Coordinating with stakeholders, including admins and developers who support in customizing and configuring the platform to support the strategic plan. Defining the community guidelines so that members feel safe and welcome and the content is relevant, helpful, and up to date. Lead and support the moderation team to moderate the community content and users. Let's dive into each of these areas: Building the Community Strategy Community Managers are the face of the community. They own the day-to-day management and implementation of the brand’s digital community strategy. As the Community Manager, you are primarily responsible for building and leading your community to align with your company's goals. Apart from these, in support of your company goals, you’ll be working to increase user engagement and advocacy, accelerating innovation, driving sales, and reducing sales costs. Before you start building your community, you must: Understand the audience: Who is the intended audience? What are they looking for? What is their level of experience? Decide the type of content that best: meets the audience needs drives site traffic improves peer-peer communication keeps users engaged Understand the stakeholders or internal audiences, including: Marketing team Product team Support team Analysts Legal team The answers to these questions help you develop a community strategy that connects members and your brand content, leading to your Community's Structure. Before you start building your community structure, you must understand what your business is trying to accomplish with your community. Hence, the structure of the community must align with the community's goals and objectives. Measuring your community health To build your community strategy, you must first determine what success means and how you will measure it. When measuring community, keep in mind that a healthy and successful community is one that meets the needs of your audience. For this, you must: Identify Key Performance indicators (KPIs) to measure community success. These KPIs must be relevant to the business and community goals. For example, the KPIs to deflect support calls or increase revenue or increase retention or increase loyalty, and so on. Measure member success rate via Aurora Analytics. Use Community Analytics to measure Community Metrics. Metrics help measure community health, which in turn supports achieving community success. Building a Community Structure Members join and stick with your community (sometimes even becoming your brand advocates) based on the content, their journey through finding knowledge, and whether they succeed with the content they find. Hence, members need a community structure in place that makes sense for your business and how you want members to engage in the community. When defining your Community Structure: Decide on the content type that will best suit to drive user engagement. Khoros Communities offers various content types to manage content and enable users to participate in the community. Take a dive into Atlas for great examples to better understand our widely used content types: Forums, Knowledge Bases, Blogs, Ideas, Events, and Groups. Identify powerful search techniques to bring knowledge directly to the user. Aurora search tools offer powerful search techniques. Identify the list of tags to increase findability. Although while building the structure you may not be able to come up with a complete list, it is good to keep in mind to come up with a list that will best suit your community content. After you have understood the intended audience and decided the Community Structure and content types, you must define member permissions to map to the access and actions you want different members of the community to have. That brings us to our next step on setting up members and identifying roles and permissions. Setting up members, roles, and permissions Identify and define the Default permissions that drive the experience for all members—new, experienced, and superusers. You can think of permissions as allowing or denying users to perform actions in different areas of the community. Determine if you want to provide a different experience for some users—for example, access to a private area in the community. Based on the decision, you can create roles and tie permissions to the roles. Here’s a list of default roles that Khoros provides while launching your community. Note: When granting elevated permissions to a member, you must apply them via a role. Check out our Getting started as community admin to know more on creating, deleting, cloning, and assigning roles to members. Although in smaller communities, a Community Manager can play the role of an Admin, Moderator, and Developer, we recommend that you delineate these tasks and assign them to different people or even teams. After you have built the community structure with content types, roles, and permissions, your community is ready to go live. Tip: If you're new to deploying a community, check out Building your first site for some tips and suggestions. As your community evolves and grows, you must make sure that it lives up to its standards by moderating content and members. You must also collaborate with the legal teams to make sure that your community is GDPR compliant and protects your member's personal information. Community Analytics As a Community Manager it is very important for you to study various trends and activities across the community and analyze if your strategies are working towards your company’s goals. Learn more about using Aurora Analytics.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAurora: Getting Started as a Community Administrator
Welcome to Aurora! Aurora is Khoros’ re-imagined Community experience that leverages more than 20 years of experience and learnings in the digital community space. This introduction guides you through the most commonly used community features and administration tasks and provides links to the best articles for these tasks. Tip: Take a tour of Aurora in this 1-hour video training course, which will help you familiarize yourself with key Aurora features and concepts. Tip: Complete self-paced training in the Khoros Academy Build Khoros Communities course. Note: Please check out the training video for new Admins, available within the Community Setting area below. Let's get started! As a Community Admin, your primary responsibilities include: Configuring and maintaining your community’s site structure Administering and managing feature areas of the community Maintaining member accounts and community content per your company's values and goals Upgrading the community to take advantage of new capabilities Before you begin, be sure to work with the Community Manager to have a thorough understanding of your community’s audience and goals. As a community admin, you’ll spend much of your time in the Community Settings area. Note: As Admin in the Khoros Community platform, you must have the Admin role. Learn more about Roles and Permissions. Community Settings The Community Settings area is where you’ll perform most of your administrative tasks. To open the settings area, go to Account Menu > Settings: Community Settings are grouped into themed areas: Structure Features Users The Settings Shortcuts page provides shortcuts to the most commonly used community settings pages. Click around and explore all the settings in these areas. Below, we’ve captured some of the most common tasks you’ll need to perform. (Depending on how roles on your team are distributed, you may not need to do all these tasks.) Build out the structure of your community Configure general and feature-specific settings Manage roles and permissions Set up, enable, and manage features that drive more community engagement Please watch the training video which guides new Admins through the most commonly used features within settings to help accomplish community administration tasks. Build out the structure of your community In the Community Structure area, you can build out and organize the topography of your site. You can decide the best way to group related content into categories and boards and which content types to provide in each area. Learn more about Community Site Structure and best practices when creating your site. Configure general and feature-specific settings From the Features area, you can configure general site settings as well as feature-specific settings that determine how things behave in your community. Manage user roles and permissions In the Users area, you can manage the roles and permissions for your community members and employees. To perform this task, you must: Define the set of default permissions for different community roles. Aurora includes some out-of-the-box roles. Tie together a permission sets to create the decided default community roles. Do this only if you want to provide a different level of access and experience for your members; for example, to access to a private area in the community. Other common member management tasks include: assign roles to members cloning roles Check out our best practices for implementing roles and permissions. Community Moderation As an Admin, you need to create a safe and vibrant place for your members to participate. Usually, you will have some moderators on your team to help you achieve these goals. In partnership with your moderators, you can: Maintain audit logs Set content filters Set abuse notifications Enable content archiving (coming soon)ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAbout Khoros Community: Aurora
Aurora is Khoros’ re-imagined Community experience that leverages more than 20 years of experience and learnings in the digital community space. Aurora delivers a sleek, modern, high-performance UX framework that adheres to community best practices while still giving brands complete flexibility to make changes or updates to address their specific needs. While built on the same platform as Khoros Community Classic, Aurora includes significant changes in the new framework: New member experience: Aurora delivers both better performance (load times, mobile-friendly pages) and design (modern UX, beautiful layouts, and pre-configured community best practices). Aurora also provides more personalization, integration with other digital properties through syndication, and an overall better experience so that communities can more easily become the heart of any brand’s digital experience. New community manager experience: Aurora enables community managers and designers to build and customize pages easier with a visual Page Template designer and control the look and feel of the community with pre-defined and customizable themes to ensure that your community reflects the visual message and tone of your brand. Moreover, you no longer need to know how to code to build these pages. New developer experience: Aurora improves the developer experience so your developers can more easily find, use, test, and extend any integrations, custom objects, or data calls (in and out of the community) to extend the capabilities of your community to do something new and provide your members with a more customized experience. Backend and Platform changes: Aurora uses new front-end technologies like React and Storybook and leverages tools like Jest and Typescript for rapid iteration and robust design. On the data side, Aurora uses GraphQL (replacing LiQL) as the way to program API interactions and get data out of the platform. Finally, the entire architecture is completely built on modern cloud services from AWS and Docker. When you’re ready to dive in, we recommend starting with one of our Getting Started Guides: Getting Started as a Community Manager Getting Started as a Community Administrator Getting Started as a Site Designer New to communities? Check out our Community Basics and take a tour of Aurora in this 1-hour video training course, which will help you familiarize yourself with key Aurora features and concepts. Moving to Aurora Since Aurora is built on the same backend data architecture as Community Classic, existing customers do not need to do a full-scale migration to move to Aurora. However, most Community Classic customers do have some customization on the front end and UI. For these customers, some additional work is required to move to Aurora. Review the Aurora Upgrade Playbook and reach out to your account manager to learn more about what to expect when migrating to Aurora. Related topics What's changed in Aurora from Community Classic Glossary of common Community Aurora termsViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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