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Arbor Memorial Inc.
Website enhancement services and support with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).
Arbor Memorial Inc. has been helping Canadian families honour their loved ones since 1947. Today the company operates one of the largest networks of memorial services locations in the country, serving more than 18,000 families each year across multiple provinces. Their tagline, "Every life. Remembered." captures what drives the organization: personalized, dignified experiences that reflect a life fully lived. At that scale, the digital platform is not peripheral. It is how families find locations, read tributes, and connect with Arbor's staff before they ever walk through a door. Built on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service, the site integrates location search, obituary management, and multilingual content across a national footprint. Keeping that platform current, healthy, and capable required a long-term partner who could deliver across the full stack: enhancements, platform maintenance, and incident response, without disrupting the live experience.
18,000+
Families served annually
1947
Operating since
EN/FR
Bilingual obituary platform
24/7
Incident coverage
Challenge
Arbor came to TechGuilds with a set of interconnected platform needs that required sustained, coordinated delivery rather than a one-time build. The obituary platform had no French-language capability, leaving Arbor unable to fully serve francophone families in Quebec and across Canada. Third-party integrations with Tukios (obituary management) and SFTP-based data pipelines required careful coordination across every enhancement cycle, and AEM as a Cloud Service evolves continuously, creating a steady stream of required library upgrades, security patches, and Adobe advisory responses. As a 24/7 customer-facing platform, Arbor needed reliable incident coverage beyond standard business hours, not just best-effort support.
Approach
French/Bilingual Obituary Platform
TechGuilds built a comprehensive multilingual obituary system, extending the platform's backend import pipelines to process English and French obituary data concurrently. Frontend work included language toggle logic, conditional rendering for bilingual profile pages, and full translation of search components, UI labels, date and time formats, guestbook flows, and donation experiences. Metadata, sitemap structure, and URL architecture were updated to correctly surface French-language content in search engines, and a data hydration initiative retroactively enriched previously English-only obituary records with French content.
Search, Location, and Content Enhancements
TechGuilds enabled proximity-based location search, letting users find nearby Arbor locations through a typeahead-driven experience, and improved obituary search to surface multi-branch bundled results. On the content authoring side, the team delivered an Alerts system with a banner and listing component, corporate-only targeting, and conditional CTA logic, along with Open Graph metadata support for social sharing previews across obituary profile pages.
Platform and DevOps Maintenance
TechGuilds managed the ongoing platform health work AEM as a Cloud Service demands: migrating deprecated AEM libraries, executing Adobe-flagged security advisories including Apache HTTPD updates and aem-cloud-testing-clients upgrades, and supporting a Java 11 to Java 21 runtime upgrade. Redirect rules for transferred and rebranded funeral home locations were maintained across multiple Canadian regions, and Azure whitelist IP rules were configured and kept current.
Support and Managed Services
Alongside enhancement delivery, TechGuilds operates a dedicated Support and Maintenance engagement covering incident response within and outside standard business hours, solution architecture oversight, QA validation on production fixes, and monthly reporting that gives Arbor's stakeholders clear visibility into support activity, resolution rates, and trends.
Results
Full bilingual platform capability delivered across obituary detail pages, search, navigation, metadata, and transactional flows.
Always-on incident coverage protecting a 24/7 platform, with response available outside standard business hours.
Proactive platform health maintained through timely library upgrades, security patches, and Adobe advisory responses.
Continuous feature delivery across a complex, multi-integration platform without disrupting ongoing operations.
TechGuilds continues to serve as Arbor Memorial's long-term AEM partner.