An AEM installation generally consists of at least two environments:
These interact to enable you to make content available on your website so that your visitors can access it.
The author environment provides the mechanisms for creating, updating, and reviewing this content before actually publishing it:
On the author environment the functionality of AEM is made available through AEM’s authoring UI. For the publish environment you design the entire look-and-feel of the interface made available to your users.
The author works in what is known as the author environment. This provides an easy to use interface (graphical user interface (GUI or UI)) for creating the content. It requires the author to login, using an account that has been assigned the appropriate access rights.
Your account needs the appropriate access rights to create, edit or publish content.
Depending on how your instance and your personal access rights are configured you can perform many tasks on your content, including (amongst others):
Additionally, there are administrative tasks that help you manage your content:
AEM is also administered from the author environment.
When ready, your site’s content is published to the publish environment. Here the website’s pages are made available to the intended audience in accordance with the look-and-feel of the designed interface.
For more information about publishing and unpublishing pages, see the document Publishing Pages.
To optimize performance for visitors to your website, the dispatcher implements load balancing and caching.