Migrating Adobe Livecycle to AEM Forms

Question

I have a requirement from one of my friend's firm where he wants to migrate from his Adobe Livecycle workflow based form management to AEM forms. Since there is an end of support planned for Livecycle, the migration needs to be quick and also there is a need for scalability. So this is the ask in specific, existing is a cluster installation running Livecycle ES3 and need to go to 6.3.

I could see that the upgrade path suggested by Adobe is ES3->ES4->AEM6.1->AEM6.3. This is both lengthy and costly. Is there a manual route that can allow the migration to happen directly. May be like I can create the two clusters and then somehow take the assets out of livecycle into the AEM forms and thing start working? If yes, then what is the scope of effort I am seeing here, like first setting up the 6.3 then probably taking a dump of assets (what all assets that need to be migrated) and what to do with Livecycle assets in AEM 6.3 to make it work?

Any quick support will be helpful. And I really hope this is the right forum for asking this question, in case not please advise the correct place and I would most happily move the question.

Answer 1

So the short answer is that it depends on what LiveCycle ES3 modules are installed. Most of the ES3 modules do not store production data that needs to be migrated so you may not need to follow the upgrade path you’ve outlined. The two modules that do store data are the Process Management and Rights Management modules. If your friend is using either of these two modules, then there is data in their production system that probably needs to be migrated (and you therefore have to go through the ES3->ES4->AEM6.1->AEM6.3 upgrade process).

If they are not using either of the “Management” modules, then you should be able to export your application to a .LCA from ES3 and then re-import the application into AEM 6.3.

If you have issues importing the .LCA, then it’s also possible to import the processes manually by unzipping the .LCA and dragging the .process files from the filesystem into AEM 6.3 workbench however you usually have to fix up any internal linkages between processes and sub-processes when you do this.

The company I work for, 4Point, specializes in LiveCycle/AEM consulting and we have lots of experience migrating customers from earlier versions of LiveCycle to the latest versions of AEM. Have your friend’s firm contact us if they need assistance in performing the migration. We’ve done lots of these kinds of migrations and know what to expect.

Answer 2

Adobe now provides a direct upgrade path from LiveCycle ES4 to AEM 6.3 Forms. You can setup a new AEM 6.3 Forms server and use the import/export route for upgrade.