AEM 6.5 Upgrade: What’s New?

Adobe Experience Manager has been dealing with these challenges for several years now. At the spring release, Adobe identified four key factors that are crucial for content marketing in large companies:

• Content delivery speed;
• Media content flexibility;
• Content efficiency insights and AI-driven analysis;
• Fast adaptation.

ACCELERATION OF CONTENT DELIVERY

Adobe Asset Link is an application that allows you to share, review, edit, and align content across Creative Cloud solutions. Now you can add users from the management, marketing, and IT departments to carry out content-related tasks. This format will make approving and releasing promotional materials easier and faster.

Here are a few of AEM 6.5 new features:

• Searching, browsing, and editing content from a single space and designing campaigns using media from Adobe collections;

• View basic characteristics about files directly through Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and the ability to find similar media using Adobe Sensei;

• Work-in-progress storage in multiple environments;

• Adding and copying new resources to AEM from Creative Clouds;

• Ability to comment on the project in progress;

• Single synchronized login to Asset Link accounts and active Creative Cloud solutions.

The Desktop App in AEM 6.5 was implemented with several major improvements. One of these is the ability to review and edit any desktop app content, including third-party vendors' solutions.

AEM 6.5 new advantages:

1. Less need in Finder/Explorer when viewing AEM content;
2. Content search within the app;
3. Previewing and opening assets in the associated app;
4. Local editing and uploading finished content to AEM;
5. Uploading files and folder hierarchies to AEM with progress monitoring.

The Brand Portal makes it easy to receive and control the distribution of approved marketing materials to external parties and within the organization between users. According to Adobe, this part of the AEM 6.5 platform is crucial – the vendor guarantees secured file transfer inaccessible to third-party users.

AEM 6.5 enhancement list:

1. Accelerated file processing when downloading;
2. Introduction of a “guest” user to enable collaboration with advertising agencies;
3. Ability to schedule content publishing;
4. User activities reporting and content share reporting based on login;
5. Accelerated browsing and viewing of the content;
6. New admin configurations to control upload sizes;
7. Stable performance when an external command is engaged.

As you can see, Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 will provide the possibility of bringing a creative cluster represented by advertising specialists into the project. The benefit of using the CMS is even more apparent. It is now easier to prepare, enhance and approve advertising content considering the common environment and supervision from every party.

Digital Assets Management. Previously, when using AEM, the client had to "bind" their website when connecting to the platform. Then, for the media asset to appear on the page, it had to be archived, uploaded to the platform, and removed if the product/content was no longer available.

AEM 6.5 helped to eliminate these steps by leveraging the Digital Assets Management tool, which allows to:

1. Use files from remote DAM when browsing a page;
2. Connect with remote DAM on a cloud;
3. Drag and drop virtual assets into the local sites page editor;
4. Preview web pages with remote DAM assets;
5. Edit remote DAM assets on sites with a local copy;
6. Publish pages with remote DAM assets.

The content translation system was enhanced with automatic algorithms and high-quality integration with outside services. More new features in AEM 6.5:

• Auto-approve of translated materials;
• Auto-delete of translation launches;
• Using translated projects in AEM projects;
• Updating translations in integrated services with pre-storing in Translation Memory;
• Exporting translation jobs in JSON format.

Interactive Communication solution enables marketers to quickly set up communication with clients on multiple sites. Now you can:

• Create templates for media kits, partner and special offers, and email chains for web, mobile, and print sources in one space.
• Quickly change scripts to refine/agree and reuse them, all in an improved input/output system;
• Easily bind sources with keyboard buttons and drag & drop features.

FLEXIBLE UTILIZATION OF MEDIA CONTENT

There are five major aspects of Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 improvements in this section:

• Working with the core content;
• Working with side content that can be published separately from the core content;
• Downloading and setting up forms and documentation;
• Content services designed for working with separate fragments;
• Single Page Applicator (SPA editor).

New in Single Page Applicator

The SPA Editor became available in AEM 6.4 and above. The latest version of the editor allows you to edit single-page sites and immediately submit changes. Server data transfer now supports JavaScript, which helps reduce page loading time and streamline SEO promotion.

It’s now easier for developers to create new websites or add-ons in AEM. JavaScript Framework is also available. To accelerate the process, the platform carries 20 easy-to-style components for use in a new template. The components are available for download as Open Source objects.

• Teaser is a link to content with an image;

• Carousel is a slideshow of images with links;

• Tabs is a solution that sorts content by tabs.

See more components available.

Core components features:

1. Pre-setup for convenient use;
2. Ability to present content in various styles;
3. Easy to use: components operate under WCAG 2.0 standard and support navigation from the keyboard;
4. SEO friendly: output HTML delivers markup for schema.org;
5. Ready for PWA/SPA/App. If components are written in JSON or Sling, models can be edited on the client’s side;
6. Expansibility: it is possible to make a unique model based on the standard component;
7. Version awareness: if a component's logic changes, the changes are transferred into the new version.

What is Experience Intelligence, and how to measure it?

Experience Intelligence employs Adobe Analytics which utilizes AI and machine learning in those aspects where traditional is likely to fail. Adobe Experience Manager with Adobe Sensei tool can analyze and find common customer behavior patterns on your website over the last few years toward specific content.

Adobe Sensei allows you to quickly find all similar SKUs available. Also, this AI tool will eliminate all issues related to cross-device content display.

That’s how Sensei works.

The Smart Crop feature is engaged once the platform has identified a user’s device type.

Vendors can gather relevant data about their prospects with smart, automated forms. With this Experience Intelligence feature, you can scan a print version of a questionnaire/form and identify each information block.

Each block can be separately edited, updated, or removed. No more unnecessary paperwork and outdated PDFs.

AEM 6.5 new features for automated forms:

• New styles have been added, and support for new layouts and templates is now available;
• Great flexibility in creating new templates: blocks can be dragged from the library or your own previously created patterns. You can undo steps and set properties for each of the fields;
• Digital ID is used for digital signatures based on PKI infrastructure and encrypted certificates, as well as regional legislation;
• Addition of OOTB components for online forms and SPAs.

Data exchange between Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics makes it possible to detect anomalies in ad campaigns, carry out A/B tests, and perform audience segmentation. Adobe Analytics will provide a marketer with the main dashboard with essential metrics and additional tabs for a more detailed analysis of a specific channel/type of content.

Fast Adaptation

Cloud Manager is one of the critical updates. This part of Adobe Experience Manager enables marketers, together with the IT department, to orchestrate the platform in 3 key directions:

1. Quality Control. Eliminates the risk of website errors by running individual campaigns in test mode. Reduces the development cycle with code auto-checking based on Adobe engineers' expertise and advanced tools.

2. Automatic stability. The system automatically determines the need for additional stability if the visitor flow spikes. To ensure uninterrupted content delivery, Cloud Manager’s API interface (available in Adobe I/O) allows connecting to external systems or to other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.

3. Updates. The new step-by-step infrastructure will allow you to update content more efficiently and migrate to the latest versions of AEM without problems on your current project.

AEM 6.5 supports:

• Oracle JDK 11 “Long Term Support” releases (LTS);
• Oracle JDK Java 8 (LTS).

At the release presentation, Adobe speakers drew the audience’s attention to the fact that agreements for integration with Oracle services listed above had been made between the vendors earlier. However, this facilitation is only available for AEM projects. The platform doesn’t support Java 9 and Java 10.

Updates and features covered in the article are the most significant ones in AEM 6.5 suit. In total, 1200 technical experts from 368 Adobe partner companies participated in AEM 6.5 beta testing worldwide. The work lasted for three months, from January to March 2019. An international IT team launched AEM Quickstart more than 600 times and eliminated 75 technical issues.

AEM 6.5 release has become a landmark event for Adobe and business, marketing, and IT communities. By tradition, the vendor has again set the trend for continuous development of media delivery and deeper cross-tool integration.

With the emergence of the new version of Adobe Experience Manager, marketers and IT specialists can work in tight collaboration. The outcome of such cooperation is the immediate delivery of personalized content.

Have any questions left? Our AEM Certified experts with dozens of successful projects are eager to help you learn more about how your business can benefit from the AEM platform. Please contact us anytime you see fit.

Additional material: Talk from Adobe Community Belarus about "AEM 6.5: tricks, killers features, fixes".

FAQ

Is AEM 6.5 cloud-based?

There are two key types of AEM 6.5:

AEM as a Cloud Service. It’s a cloud-native service that is always current, scalable, accessible, and extensible. AEM with Managed Services. This solution leverages automation with cloud-native functionality.

These solutions are pretty similar but have various differences as well.

What is the latest AEM version?

As of 2022, Adobe Experience Manager is currently a 6.5 version solution. These include new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. A new version is expected to be announced soon.

Which feature is associated with AEM 6.5 sites out-of-box?

Connected DAM for Sites Authoring to leverage assets from remote DAM for authoring web pages in the Page Editor.

Another feature is the out-of-the-box (OOTB) components for building responsive page experiences with less coding and customization.