What is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?
AEM is an enterprise-grade web content management system with a wide array of powerful features that allows organizations to create, manage and analyze all their digital assets – website creation, setting up blogs, social media feeds, setting up marketing campaigns, integration of e-commerce, etc.
Version history of CQ releases
Adobe Experience Manager 6.0 was released on May 22, 2014. We would, however, be covering AEM 5.6 for this blog post as it is the more widely implemented CMS as on date.
AEM 5.6 is an upgrade release to the
CQ 5.5 code base. It provides new and enhanced functionality, key customer fixes, high priority customer enhancements and general bug fixes oriented toward product stabilization. It also includes all CQ 5.5 feature pack, hot fix, and service pack releases. Key enhancements are directed towards an even better usability for all users (authors, administrators, and developers), to further facilitate all tasks related to the content live cycle in a global enterprise.
Though there are number of new features in this release, but some of the key enhancements which would attract consulting focus areas under–
e-Commerce Integration Framework / Out of box integration with hybrid
Out of box integration with Salesforce.com
New client-side device feature detection using BrowserMap
New Touch-optimized UI for DAM and parts of WCM
Introduce DAM asset annotations and asset expiry handling
eCommerce integration framework is really going to make a buzz as it not only integrates with any eCommerce product, it also provides a number of out-of-box components which natively support e-commerce functionality –
Product information display component
Shopping cart
Check-out
With AEM native e-commerce functionality, product database is maintained in CRX repository (JCR).
Adobe Product Portfolio: Digital Marketing Suite à Adobe Marketing Cloud
Adobe has also restructured the product portfolio from Digital Marketing Suite to Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe Marketing Cloud is a bucket of products to provide complete customer experience. It provides a complete set of analytics, social, advertising, targeting and web experience management solutions and a real-time dashboard that brings a common dashboard for marketing campaigns.
Marketing Cloud also includes Adobe Campaign which provides campaigns, offers, and personalization management capabilities for sophisticated automation and execution of marketing programs across all channels – digital and traditional. Adobe Campaign addresses a key challenge for marketers: how to build and extend relationship with their customer base to drive top-line revenue growth and ROI.
Now you must be thinking – Did Adobe develop this platform?
Any guess – Yes / No? Answer is No.
Existing Adobe Users: How to Upgrade to AEM 5.6?
Users with an Adobe license can upgrade to AEM 5.6 in either of the two ways depicted below:
Let’s discuss both of them in detail:
1. Upgrade from version 5.1 to 5.5
There are two ways to upgrade from your previous
Adobe CQ5x versions to AEM 5.6
a) In-place upgrade approach
This approach is used to upgrade on same CQ instance.
Key steps:
Stop existing CQ instance
Replace the jar / war file with the latest version
Restart the instance
b) Use Package Manager
The package manager is used to export all content and application code, and import to NEW instance.
Nicole
