Adobe Experience Manager
As the digital world continues to grow, the opportunities to engage with consumers have never been greater. People are using their mobile devices wherever and whenever they want. According to the survey by Forrester in 2015, the web influences more than half of the retail sales. Consumers are also twirling unprecedented influence as they spontaneously express their opinions about brands in social forums.
In this fragmented landscape, businesses have to cut through the noise to capture the mindshare of their customers. They have to create fascinating presence everywhere their customers are and have to engage them with relevant and personalized content. But the prospect of delivering and optimizing customer experiences at every point presents a major challenge.
To meet these challenges, businesses have to invest in new technologies and processes with their adaptive and innovative ideas. Most of the systems and workflows for managing and publishing online content are less equipped to serve the marketing needs of multichannel consumers. The customization tactics are not consistently deployed. Also, when the website is launched, the responses and interactions are not thoroughly measured or analysed.
The Adobe Experience Manager, which consists of web content management and digital asset management, solves these challenges by providing solutions for engaging customer experiences.
WHAT AEM IS ABOUT
Adobe Experience Manager is a web based client side server system for building, executing, and deploying commercial websites and related services. It combines a number of infrastructure-level and application-level functions into a single united package.
At the infrastructure level AEM provides:
Web application server: AEM can be deployed in stand-alone mode or as an application within a third party application server.
Web application framework: AEM consolidates the sling web application framework that simplifies the writing of RESTful, content-oriented web applications.
Content Repository: AEM also includes a Java content repository(JCR). JCR is a type of hierarchical database which is designed especially for structured and semi-structured data. The repository stores not only the user’s data but it also stores the code, templates, and internal data which are used by the application.
THE DEPLOYMENT SCENARIOS
AEM terminology an “instance” is a copy of AEM running on a server. AEM involves two instances, which are typically running on separate machines.
Author: An AEM instance is used to create, upload, and edit content and also to supervise the website. Once the content is ready to go live, it is replicated to the publish instance.
Publish: An AEM instance serves the published content to the public.
These instances are identical concerning to the installed software. They are differentiated by configuration. Also, most of the installations use a dispatcher.
Dispatcher: A static web server multiplied with the AEM dispatcher module. It caches the web pages produced by the publish instance to improve the performance.
Software: Customers with a valid support contract will receive an e-mail notification with a code and will able to download AEM from Adobe Licensing Website.
The AEM software is available in two forms i.e.,
cq-quickstart-6.2.0.jar: it is standard executable jar file that includes everything which is needed for running the application.
cq-quickstart-6.2.0.war: a war file is used for deployment in a third-party application server.
Also, in addition to that, a user also needs a license code or a license.properties file, holding a valid code.
INSTALLATION
- Create an install directory in your local server.
In Unix – /opt/aem
In Windows – C:\Program Files\aem
Generally, we will refer the location as,
Note: The path of the file directory must consist of only US-ASCII characters.
– Place the jar and license files in this directory.
cq-quickstart-6.2.0.jar
license.properties
If the user does not provide a license.properties file, AEM automatically redirects the user to Welcome screen, where the user can enter a license key. The user needs to request a valid license key if the user does not have one yet.
– To start-up the instance in GUI environment, a user needs to double click on
cq-quickstart-6.2.0.jar file.
AEM will take few minutes to unpack the jar file, install itself, and to start-up. The above-mentioned procedure results in:
– An AEM author instance.
– Runs on localhost.
– At port 4502.
To access the instance point on your browser:
http://localhost:4502
The result in author instance will be automatically configured to connect a publish instance on localhost:4503.