Web Content Management Using AEM

Author Environment

Create, edit, and manage content on custom or predefined templates in a user-friendly graphical user interface. This layer is usually protected by an organization’s internal firewall and requires administrator to assign login credentials to author. Creating, editing, and accessing content have been made easier with floating windows from which digital assets and texts can be accessed in any editable page.

Publishing Environment

Publishing web pages in your site can be done through activation and deactivation. These actions can also be scheduled to a later date and time. If a root page has a few sub pages, AEM provides the option to activate them from ‘activation tree’ which specifies path for the sub pages automatically.

AEM uses Java Content Repository, a standardized, vendor and implementation independent API that can access content within any content repository. AEM is built on Apache Sling which uses content repositories such as Jackrabbit or CRX repository as data store. These open-source frameworks bring down content management costs, development effort, and time when compared to vendor-based or legacy CMS systems.

AEM implements OSGi framework that makes modular application development feasible. This helps development efforts to concentrate on real application logic by availing existing libraries and frameworks.

Adobe Experience Manager also leverages PhoneGap to facilitate hybrid app development.

The author and publish environments can be configured to suite your contextual requirements. Authentication, user access controls, replication privileges, and assigning permissions are some of the user administration features in AEM.

Content management is made easier with tags and namespaces. Tags make organizing and accessing items from your content repository faster. In AEM, they can be edited, moved from one location to another, searched, merged, or deleted. AEM also allows for administration of user content generated through email and social community elements that include blogs, forums, polls, voting, and rating.

AEM offers an advanced built-in module called DAM to organize, manage, and share digital assets and sub-assets across your organization. DAM comprises metadata-support, Renditions, DAM Finder, and DAM Administrator UI which serves various AEM users such as author, administrator, and general user.

An author’s operations mainly depend on the interface features, Content Finder and Asset Dialog. Assets include images, graphics, videos, documents, audio files, and rich media such as flash files. Asset management is further eased with the possibility to group them by tags, lightboxes, and favorites (stars).

Administrators rely on Asset Editor to perform a wide range of operations. In the Asset Editor, admins can add or edit tags and metadata of assets, build searchable repository of assets and metadata, create and restore asset versions, use interactive editing on images, upload thumbnails, activate or deactivate assets, move asset location, apply workflow to activate or deactivate assets or to process multiple assets simultaneously, download/import/export/delete multiple assets, and manage access rights to assets.