Install Adobe Experience Manager desktop app install-app-v2

Using the Adobe Experience Manager desktop app, the assets within Experience Manager are easily available on your local desktop and can be used in any native desktop applications. Assets can be previewed and opened in desktop apps. They can be revealed in Finder or Explorer for use in documents, and edited locally. Changes are saved back to Experience Manager, creating a new version upon upload.

Such an integration allows various roles in the organization to:

  • Manage the assets centrally in Experience Manager Assets.

  • Access the assets in any native desktop applications, including third-party applications and in Adobe Creative Cloud. While doing so, users can easily adhere to the various standards including branding.

To use the Experience Manager desktop app:

For detailed information, see the Experience Manager desktop app release notes.

Upgrade from a previous version upgrade-from-previous-version

If you are a user of v1.x of the desktop app, then understand the differences and similarities between the previous and the latest version of the app. See what is new in the desktop app and how the app works.

NOTE
Two versions of a desktop app cannot co-exist on a computer. Before you install a version, uninstall the other version.

To upgrade from a previous version of the app, follow these instructions:

  1. Before upgrading, sync all your assets and upload your changes to Experience Manager. Doing so avoids you losing any edits when uninstalling the app.

  2. Uninstall the previous version of the app. When uninstalling, select the option to clear the cache.

  3. Restart your computer.

  4. Download and install the latest app. Follow the instructions below.

Install install-v2

To install the desktop app, follow these steps. Uninstall any existing Adobe Experience Manager desktop app v1.x before installing the latest app. For more info, see above.

  1. Download the latest installer from the release notes page.

  2. Keep the URL and credentials of your Experience Manager deployment handy.

  3. If you are upgrading from another version of the app, see upgrade desktop app.

  4. Skip this step if you are using Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, Experience Manager 6.4.4 or later, or Experience Manager 6.5.0 or later. Ensure that your Experience Manager setup meets the compatibility requirements mentioned in the release notes. If necessary, download the applicable compatibility package and install it using the Experience Manager Package Manager as an Experience Manager administrator. To install a package, see How to work with Packages.

  5. Run the installer binary and follow the onscreen instructions to install.

  6. On Windows, the installer may prompt to install Visual Studio C++ Redistributable 2015. Follow the on-screen instructions to install it. If the installation fails, install it manually. Download the installer from here and install both vc_redist.x64.exe and vc_redist.x86.exe files. Re-run the Experience Manager desktop app installer.

  7. Restart the computer as prompted. Launch and configure the desktop app.

  8. To connect the app with an Experience Manager repository, click the app icon in the tray and launch the app. Provide the address of the Experience Manager server in the format https://[aem_server]:[port]/.

    Click Connect and provide the credentials.

    Connection screen of desktop app to input server address

    Figure: Connection screen to input server address.

    Select Remember Connection to avoid entering the connection details each time you log on to the desktop app.

    note caution
    CAUTION
    Ensure that there are no leading or trailing spaces before or after the address of the Experience Manager server. Otherwise, the app cannot connect to the Experience Manager server.
  9. [Optional] Click I want to connect a different way and click Adobe login to log on to the Experience Manager Assets server using Adobe Identity Management Service (IMS). IMS logon lets the desktop app perform access token refresh automatically, letting the user stay logged on for up to 14 days. Click Direct login to perform the standard logon to the Experience Manager server using the user’s credentials.

    Adobe Login

  10. Upon successful connection, you can view the list of folders and assets available in the root folder of the Experience Manager DAM. You can browse the folders from within the app.

    Upon login the app displays the DAM contents

    Figure: Application displays the DAM contents after login

  11. (Experience Manager 6.5.1 or later) If you are using the desktop app with Experience Manager 6.5.1 or later, upgrade S3 or Azure connector to version 1.10.4 or later. See Azure connector or S3 connector.

    If you are an Adobe Managed Services (AMS) customer, contact Adobe Customer Support.

Set preferences set-preferences

To change preferences, click More options icon and Preference Preferences icon . In the Preferences window, adjust the values of the following:

  • Launch the application on logon.

  • Show a window when the application starts.

  • Cache Directory: Location of the local cache of the app (it contains the locally downloaded assets).

  • Network Drive Letter: The drive letter used to map to the Experience Manager DAM. Do not change this network drive letter if you are not sure. The app can map to any drive letter on Windows. If two users place assets from different drive letters, they cannot see the assets placed by each other. The path of the assets change. The assets remain placed in the binary file (say INDD) and are not removed. The app lists all the available drive letters and by default uses the last-available letter that is typically Z.

  • Maximum Cache Size: Allowed cache on hard disk in GB that is used for storing locally downloaded assets.

  • Current cache size: Storage size of the locally downloaded assets. The information is displayed only after assets are downloaded using the app.

  • Automatically download linked assets: When you download the original file, assets placed in supported native Creative Cloud apps are automatically fetched.

  • Maximum number of downloads: caution icon Change with caution. When downloading assets for the first time (via Reveal, Open, Edit, Download, or similar option), the assets are downloaded only if the batch contains less than this number. The default value is 50. Do not change if you are unsure. Raising the value can result in longer wait times, while lowering it might prevent you from downloading all necessary assets or folders in one attempt.

  • Use legacy conventions when creating nodes for assets and folders: caution icon Change with caution. This setting lets the app emulate v1.10 app behavior when uploading folders. In v1.10, the node names created in the repository respect the spaces and casing of the folder names provided by the user. However, in v2.1 of the app, the extra spaces in the folder names are converted to dashes. For example, uploading New Folder or new folder creates the same node in the repository if the option is not selected and the default behavior in v2.1 is retained. If this option is selected, then different nodes are created in the repository for the above two folders and it matches the behavior of the v1.10 app.

    The default behavior of v2.1 remains unchanged: it replaces multiple spaces in folder names with dashes in the repository node name and converts node names to lowercase.

  • Upload Acceleration: caution icon Change with caution. When uploading assets, the application can use concurrent uploads to improve upload speed. You can increase the concurrency of the upload by moving the slider to the right. The slider on the far left-hand side means no concurrency (single-threaded upload), the middle position corresponds to ten concurrent threads, and the maximum limit on the far right-hand side corresponds to 20 concurrent threads. A higher concurrency limit is more resource-intensive.

To update the unavailable preferences, log out of the Experience Manager server and then update. After updating the preferences, click Save preferences .

Desktop app preferences and settings

Figure: Desktop app preferences.

Proxy support proxy-support

The Experience Manager desktop app uses the system’s pre-defined proxy to connect to the Internet over HTTPS. The app can only connect using a network proxy that does not require extra authentication.

If you configure or modify proxy server settings for Windows (Internet Options > LAN Settings), restart the Experience Manager desktop app for the changes to take effect. Proxy configuration applies when you start the desktop app. Close and re-launch the app for any changes to take effect.

If your proxy requires authentication, the IT team can allow the Experience Manager Assets URL in the proxy server settings to allow the application traffic to pass through.

Uninstall the app uninstall-the-app

To uninstall the application on Windows, follow these steps:

  1. Upload all your changes to Experience Manager to avoid losing any edits. See Edit assets and upload updated assets to Experience Manager. Log off and Exit the app.

  2. Remove the app as you’d remove any other OS application. Uninstall it from Add and remove programs on Windows.

  3. To remove the cache and logs, select the necessary check box.

    Uninstall dialog to remove logs and cache

  4. Follow the onscreen instructions. When completed, restart the computer.

To uninstall the application on Mac, follow these steps:

  1. Upload all your changes to Experience Manager to avoid losing any edits. See Edit assets and upload updated assets to Experience Manager. Log off and Exit the app.

  2. Remove the Adobe Experience Manager Desktop.app from /Applications.

Alternatively, to clean internal application caches on the Mac and uninstall the app, you can run the following command in the terminal:

/Applications/Adobe Experience Manager Desktop/Contents/Resources/uninstall-osx/uninstall.sh
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