Adobe has rolled out the new Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 and we’re thrilled about all the new features. The new version of the leading web content management system (WCMS) offers an even stronger infrastructure to deliver better customer experience. What’s more, it also enables developers, content managers and marketing professionals to collaborate on the rapid delivery of personalized brand experiences, exactly when and where they are expected.
Some of the new functionality added to AEM 6.5 are the support for core component enhancements, Java 11 and user experience updates. But the list doesn’t stop here. Here are the top 19 features of AEM 6.5 that you need to know about.
1. Connected DAM
It is one of the most expected features and given the highest importance by the customers. With this feature, AEM asset enables sites author to access the Remote DAM with content finder panel in page editor and lets the user drag and drop assets. The authors can have uninterrupted search, browse, and embed assets from a different AEM Assets instance.
2. Content fragments
Content Fragments can be used to describe and manage structured content. This feature allows you to make content that is adapted to use in different channels and various locations, by designing, creating, curating and publishing page-independent content.
3. Single Page Applications (SPA)
The SPA editor in Experience Manager Sites allows developers and marketers to preview, edit, and manage content in-context and in one location for quick and easy collaboration. AEM SPA editor is powered with in-context composition and content editing. With Server side rendering of AEM SPA, page load time can be reduced to improve SEO and localization and translation workflows can be leveraged.
4. Smart Crop
Smart Crop identifies and crops the most important parts of a video to ensure the best video experience for website visitors. This features allows content creators to film with their phones, and not bother with what direction they hold it. Through embedded artificial intelligence, AEM will always keep the points of interest, even when the ratio aspect isn’t preserved.
5. Smart Tags
Now extended to video and powered by Adobe Sensei, Smart Tags automates the process of video discovery with intelligent tags that correspond to actions, attributes and objects in videos. This allows you to upload a video and have it automatically tagged so your search time is minimized.
Using Sensei’s AI technology it automatically recognizes the focal point of the image so it can be correctly tagged for you convenience.
6. Video thumb-nailing
AEM Assets custom video thumbnails provide authors with the ability to choose the exact point in the video to create their own thumbnail or use machine learning to intelligently select the best thumbnail from a set of generated thumbnails.
7. Quality gate enhancements
These enhancements quicken time to market and reduce any risks by implementing engineering best practices to test and launch custom code.
8. Frictionless upgrades
Adobe focused on making upgrades easier, by introducing the frictionless cloud update. This reduces update time and complexity, providing teams the access to the newest Experience Manager features even quicker and with minimal downtime.
It provides a report of elements of the code that need to be adapted and any change that needs to be done in the configuration code will be highlighted.
9. Adobe Asset link
This feature links AEM Assets with Creative Cloud desktop apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, allowing you to discover, use and edit assets directly from these apps. It streamlines collaboration between creatives and marketers in the content creation process.
10. AEM Desktop App
This app allows you to use the assets within AEM through any local desktop and you can use them in any desktop applications. Assets can be easily searched in Mac Finder or Windows Explorer, opened in desktop applications, and changed locally – the changes can then be saved back to AEM with a new version created in the repository.
11. Connected assets
Site authoring becomes much easier with Connected Assets. With this feature, it is not required to copy content from one instance into the next, therefore, enabling to leverage assets from remote DAM for authoring web pages. Drag-drop and preview features are also available with remote DAM assets.
12. Automated form conversion
This updated version of AEM Forms accelerates digitization and modernization of visitors’ data capture experience. Through automated conversion of legacy print forms to device friendly and responsive adaptive form, your team gains a simpler way of collecting customer information.
13. Auto-scaling
Keeping your website maintenance and managed hosting teams on top of their game, auto-scaling automatically adds capacity during high user traffic, by intelligently detecting the need for additional capacity when the production environment is subject to unusually high load. All of this is done to guarantee that the end user experience is not compromised by operational limitations.
14. Visual search
Powered by Adobe Sensei, Visual Search helps marketers use Experience Manager Assets with finding similar images to a specific asset in seconds.
15. Enhanced personalization
This feature offers a single holistic big view of customers from multiple sources with ability to build custom reports, with basic and advanced personalization options. For example, through Adobe Sensei anomaly detection capabilities, you can identify peculiar trends or seasonality, or get recommendations to auto-allocate the best experiences for specific website visitor segments.
16. Digital signage
Advancements to Experience Manager digital signage extend marketers’ ability to design, deliver and optimize experiences on digital displays in physical venues, such as in-store screens or kiosks. This includes support for massive scale signage networks, and powerful publishing and approval workflows to speed up delivery and consistency of in-store campaigns.
17. Deeper integration with Adobe Sign Cloud
Part of Adobe Document Cloud, this feature now allows customers to digitally sign documents for personal and professional transactions such as contracts, agreements, leases and loans, while meeting all the regulatory requirements.
18. Assets Brand Portal
It enables to acquire, control, and securely distribute approved creative assets to external parties and internal business users. With high-speed asset transfer using Brand Portal, business can now accelerate asset sourcing and two-way distribution in a more flexible way, for marketing teams to manage assets with colleagues globally.
19. HTTP Rest API for Content Fragment
The new HTTP REST API provides AEM developers with more support for headless content delivery. Bulk delivery of fragment structure and content is possible. Output is in JSON format that can be consumed across SPA, Mobile Apps, IoT apps and more.