Esri Community is preparing to undergo an important upgrade to the next generation version of the Khoros Community platform it is hosted on. This upcoming version of the hosting platform is known as Aurora and a transition is planned for the first half of 2025.
The Aurora upgrade reflects evolving best practices for online communities and incorporates capabilities that keep pace with the state of technology. The bulk of changes that Aurora introduces improve behind-the-scenes processes, such as expanding analytics, simplifying maintenance of structural elements (Places, User Groups, Boards, etc.), and easing the management of member permissions. We expect these improvements to positively impact our users via gains in Esri Community team efficiencies, broadened insights, and the modernized platform’s ability to better adopt future features of interest.
Though Aurora’s most prominent enhancements target the Esri Community backend, users will benefit from some front-end updates as well, not to mention a refreshed look that balances familiarity of current Esri Community pages with clean, appealing design choices attuned to Esri aesthetics.
This change has been long in development, during which the Esri Community team has closely worked with both our platform vendor, Khoros, and our third-party developers to reach a rapidly nearing stage of readiness to launch the Aurora update. We expect our users to experience a low-impact transition in which existing accounts, activity history, and login credentials are automatically retained, and any adaptations to users’ workflows are minor.
We are deeply excited for the Aurora update and for the advantages it provides our diverse base of Esri Community users both in the short and long term.
Over the next few months and ahead of launch, we’ll be sharing additional details for your awareness, including lists of feature and terminology changes. To supplement communications, we’ve assembled an Aurora FAQ Document that answers questions users may have and which will be added to over time.
