Today I attended a Webinar given by Adobe showing a sneak peek at CQ5.5. Almost a year ago I blogged about how Adobe CQ5 had arrived. Adobe CQ5.5 will include significant improvements especially for digital marketers. Adobe plans to announce CQ5.5 in March, 2012 and there will be lots more new features than what I cover here.
First, Adobe purchased PhoneGap late in 2011 and has incorporated that tool into CQ5.5. While in the past you could target CQ5 for multiple devices, with the inclusion of PhoneGap, CQ5.5 will take mobile to new heights. In the demo, Adobe showed how easy it is to drop a camera widget on the mobile page and then preview the exact functionality via the device’s emulator. So as you are building the mobile site, you can instantly see how each device will exactly render the page.
A second really nice feature is the Client Context view of your site. Here you can open the site with a context viewer to see how the pages will look to various audiences. In the context viewer, you can adjust user attributes to see how the page reacts. You can click on a location in a map and the page will display based on that locale. You can click on different devices and see how your page looks in that context. This provides a great way to experiment visually with personalization rules.
Adobe is now including translations of your page into multiple languages. For example, you can create a page in English, then click on the icon for French and have the page translated directly. Translations can be configured to use Google Translation as the engine or you can integrate others.
One final new feature I like is the inclusion of Adobe Bridge. This allows editors to seamlessly manage digital assets in CQ5.5 and keep them in-sync with other media efforts. So from CQ5.5 you can open an image from the library, make changes to it through Photoshop and save the changes. Or somebody on your creative team can make changes to an image in the digital asset library. Those changes immediately appear in CQ5.5 and then can be workflowed prior to publishing to the site. Likewise, content and images used to generate brochures from inDesign can be reused in CQ5.5 directly. The goal is to reduce the pain often associated with trying to sync the creative department with the web management team.
It will be exciting to see what else is coming in Adobe CQ5.5.
