Cedric Huesler @keepthebyte is a Product Manager at Adobe and works on the web content management aspect of AEM. Cedric demoed 10 new features coming in AEM 6.0, which was announced yesterday. A new major version (6.0 vs 5.6) for AEM indicates a major architectural change in the product. Adobe expects the new architecture to work seemlessy with prior versions, but will allow for more scalability, etc.
I’ve included a video of Cedric talking about new features in AEM 6.0. Cedric demo’d the new features using a tablet to show how they’ve fully enabled the touch interface for the authoring environment.
The first new feature deals with language translation. This release does a better job of managing translations. A site contains a language master for the content and then Live Copy is used to created the translated content for each country. A new References feature allows you too see where a content item is used and where it has been translated. The translation workflow goes out to a translation vendor through an API that Adobe has built into AEM.
One common problem with language translation that Adobe has addressed is updating translated content when the master changes. AEM also includes a ‘diff’ tool so you can compare two different copies and identify the differences.
Feature two deals with creating impactful content. Creating good content is now what drives ranking in search engines, so there is added emphasis on creating good content. AEM brings in interesting information to help a content author create better content. Content Insight brings charts about how your content is doing on the site or it could be a list of recommendations from third party providers. These providers (like BrightEdge) can seamlessly integrate with AEM when enabled.
App Authoring – or PhoneGap Enterprise combined with AEM – allows you to create and manage mobile apps right in AEM. The application also runs within AEM, but it really consists of components that you can combine to create the app. These components are specific to the mobile app, so you wouldn’t use it on the web site. The best use case for Apps is a content heavy site. By using PhoneGap Enterprise, you can include Adobe Analytics in the Adobe Marketing Cloud to track usage of the mobile apps. Other Marketing Cloud components (like Campaigns) can also be leveraged.
Adobe has brought a lot of functionality from Scene 7 and baked it right into AEM. Scene 7 is really useful for changing images on the fly for personalization among other items. SpinSet is used to take images and make them into a 360 view. All the image manipulation you can do in Scene 7 will be available in AEM directly.
Digital asset management has been enhanced with workflow that allows you to create tasks on the fly. Tasks are integrated with the AEM dashboard. When dealing with multiple assets – like picking a photo from photo shoot – you can see all the images on one page and then pick or approve the one you like best.
When integrated with the Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Social, you can find and manage social conversations from within AEM. This is done by pushing external content into Adobe Social where you can create content, reply to conversations. Adobe Social calls this Unified Moderation. You can correlate user profiles on the website with users on social media.
In addition the Adobe Social integration, there are some social features in AEM. Now you will be able to moderate posts in forums and other places where users can make comments. You can also translate comments through the same translation workflow as other content.
communities.adobe.com is now available to discover and support communities across the globe. This feature is not just for AEM, but is useful for all Marketing Cloud products. Adobe wants to have communities for Marketing professionals and web site owners as well as developers.
Building sites more efficiently using Developer Mode. Adobe has developed tools to convert HTML into the components that AEM requires to build a site. This would eliminate some steps needed today to translate a site’s design into actual usable components. Tools are also included to help a developer understand how a page has been constructed, how long each component takes to load, and also see what code is being executed in the components.
Adobe is also including a new tag language that can help you create components without code. These tags can grab data from the server and put it into the HTML at run time. This looks similar to using JSP tags on a page.
Integration, Front-end Testing can also be done right within the interface. Tests can be scripted and then run right within AEM. This can eliminate some manual testing of web sites in the SDLC. Results show you right in the interface where problems occurred.
There are new Heatlh Dashboards targeted for system admins. The dashboard shows the status of various parts of AEM and highlights any areas where problems exist. These dashboards can also show when maintenance tasks must be run.
Finally, Projects is a new feature. Projects group content together with other items, such as tasks, experiences, workflows, etc. These are presented as a Dashboard for the project so you don’t have to hunt for all these items across the AEM interface.
Adobe Summit: Top new features in Adobe Experience Manager WCM
by Mark Polly on March 26th, 2014 | ~ minute read
