Key takeaways
- AEM has three service tiers with distinct roles. The author service is where content creators do their work — creating pages, uploading assets, and managing the site. The publish service serves the live experience to your public audience. There is also an optional preview service that lets internal stakeholders review content before it goes live publicly. These are separate environments, not just views of the same system.
- AEM Sites, AEM Assets, and AEM Forms serve different purposes. Sites is for composing and delivering digital experiences as web pages and websites. Assets is for digital asset management — storing, organizing, and delivering things like images and videos. Forms is for creating and managing complex forms and business processes, often used by organizations like insurance companies or health agencies across multiple screens and languages.
- "Highlighting" and "selecting" a page in the Sites console do different things. Clicking a page's title text highlights it — making it the active context (for example, as the parent when creating a new child page) and displaying its title in the breadcrumb at the top. Clicking its checkbox or card icon selects it — which reveals the action bar along the top so you can perform operations like edit, copy, move, or publish.
- The content tree in the left rail lets you navigate the site hierarchy quickly. Rather than drilling down level by level in card view or list view, the content tree shows the full clickable hierarchy so you can jump directly to any level of the site structure.
- The two global navigation icons serve different audiences. The compass icon is designed for content authors and leads to the main content creation consoles (Sites, Assets, Experience Fragments, Projects, and Personalization). The tools (hammer) icon is for administrators, developers, and operations staff who need access to system-level configurations.