# AEM Forms meets nearshoring

> AEM Forms skills are rare, and our clients needed more of them during US business hours. Starting in 2016 we trained AEM Forms developers in Central America and paired them with our US architects. In 2018 we opened an office in San José, Costa Rica. Here is what made it work, and why we still don’t call ourselves a nearshoring company.

- Author: Charles Rich (Source 360 Group)
- Type: Lesson learned
- Products: AEM Forms, AEM
- Industry: Cross-industry
- Client: our own delivery team (anonymized)
- Platform: Adobe Experience Manager
- Technologies: AEM Forms, Adaptive Forms, XDP
- Topics: Nearshore delivery, Team model, AEM Forms skills
- Nearshore since: 2016
- San José office: Opened 2018
- Canonical: https://www.source360group.com/stories/aem-forms-meets-nearshoring/

## The problem we kept running into

AEM Forms is a niche inside a niche. A good forms developer needs to know XDP templates, LiveCycle Designer, Adaptive
Forms, workflows and the back-office systems the data ends up in. There were never many of those people, and the ones
we had were booked months out.

Our clients wanted more forms work done, done faster, and done by people they could reach during their working day.
Offshore teams twelve hours away didn’t fit the way forms projects really run: lots of short questions, quick reviews
with the business, and fixes the same afternoon.

## What we tried

In 2016 we started small. We brought on a few developers in Central America, trained them on AEM Forms ourselves, and
put them on real projects next to our US architects. They weren’t a separate team we handed work to. They were in the
same stand-ups, on the same calls with clients, and in the same code reviews.

## Why Costa Rica

It went well enough that in 2018 we opened an office in San José, Costa Rica. A lot of our people there still work from
home, but having a real office gave the team a permanent base, and it gave us a second home.

![The Source360 team at dinner in San José, Costa Rica](https://www.source360group.com/images/stories/costa-rica-team-dinner-960.webp)

_An early team dinner in San José._

Costa Rica runs on Central Time, the same as our Austin office for half the year and one hour behind for the other half.
In practice that means one shared working day with our clients, not a handoff overnight.

## How it turned out

Today our Central American developers work on AEM Forms projects across our client base, whether or not a project
started with them. To a client, they are simply part of the Source360 team.

## What I’d tell you

We still don’t call ourselves a nearshoring company, and that’s on purpose. Nearshoring only worked for us because we
treated it as hiring and training people for our own team, not as a cheaper way to send work somewhere else. If you’re
looking at nearshore help for AEM, ask whether those people will be in your meetings, know your forms, and still be
there next year. That matters more than the hourly rate.

## Related services

- AEM Forms: https://www.source360group.com/aem/forms/
- About Source 360 Group: https://www.source360group.com/company/