2026.03.0 AEM Release Overview Video

Transcript

The latest release of AEM is here, and it’s packed with updates designed to streamline your workflow. From powerful new features to subtle performance enhancements, there is plenty to explore. Let’s dive into the highlights of this release. Delivering intent-aware experiences starts with the ability to generate winning experiences faster, and activation puts the content to work. In order to drive intent-aware experiences, optimization needs to happen continuously. Trust and governance is embedded in Experience Manager in every aspect, from generation to optimization. And foundational services leverage AI to power the broad range of AEM applications.

This release brings several innovations and features to enhance your experience. Features like AEM Content Advisor, general availability with Adobe Apps, Microsoft Office Connector for PowerPoint, Word, Excel, workflow support for the Interactive Communication Editor, theme editor support for core components, versioning support for forms, governance agent, brand management, audit permissions on Touch UI, OIDC logout feature, Cloud Manager MCP server, pause maintenance updates, and experience production agent updates and launches support. Let’s start with enhancements for how to activate content. AEM Content Advisor. Hi everyone. As a marketer with Fresh Copper Coffee brand, my intention here is to access content from AEM to author the email that I’m trying to send out. So as we see here, my first intent is that I want to refer and use a particular asset from AEM within AGO’s email editor workflow. Here, I could either come here to AGO’s editor screen and access a particular image and drag and drop a component here, or I could add a HTML component which will invoke the personalization editor in AEM.

As I open up the personalization editor, we do have touchpoints here for assets, which will invoke the AEM Content Advisor, AEM Content Advisor into the AGO’s workflow. For my repository selection, I would make the selection to go into the necessary repository here.

And as you can see here, an added functionality here, what we have is uploading a brief. You can click on this particular action, which will allow marketers like to access and upload a marketing page, which will take the semantic search of any text components to give me the suggested content, which I intend to use in my marketing email. The other way could be that I can just simply add text with context here. So I’m writing coffee in mountains to give me all the assets, which basically have a pictorial representation of the same context. You can see that all the content or all the assets where we have the contents related of the coffee in mountain background is being displayed. So for example, this is the image which I intend to use. I can go ahead, click on this icon to see a complete overview of the different metadata and the content variations that is existing here.

I’ll also be able to see the dynamic media renditions. As you can see, I can see if it’s a scene 7 or an open API URL, the different renditions which are already created and available, the different smart crop options, or I could also go ahead and add different modifiers on the go before I make the selection to add this particular asset. Once I click select, and save the personalization editor, you can see that the image that we wanted to insert has come into our authoring content in within the Acrete editor. Now, let’s see how we can add a particular AM content fragment component to further author the content or the email that I’m trying to create. So for the same, I again open up the personalization editor and from here, I access the AM content fragment editor, which is available here to open up the center. This again invokes the AM content advisor, which gives me a listing of all the content fragments that I can view and access based on the repo selection I make. Here you can see, there is a good thumbnail view of the different AMCFs that are available for me to select from. For example, if I open up the icon here, I will be able to see all the related metadata for this AMCF, along with the different variations that is available, which will allow me to choose a particular variation to be inserted. Further, if I want to see a preview of the AM content fragment to see what is the content I’m trying to access, I’ll be able to use the preview option and see what is the content in a very UI friendly manner.

Once I’ve made the selection, I’ll be able to select the AMCF which I want to include and click select.

With this, the AM content fragment gets inserted into my personalization editor. I can expand this view to add the content as required. Say for example, here I’m trying to insert the content attribute of the AMCF here. Click save and with that, you can see how this gets inserted into the email editor screen. To further simulate and see how my content looks like, I will be able to click simulate content to see the final picture of how the content is inserted. This is a clear example of how integration with AM to bring in assets and content fragments with the unified experience selector helps in content creation. Thank you. Microsoft Office Connector, PowerPoint, Word, Excel.

With this new turnkey connector, users will be able to find and select content from the AM assets repository and import into their active MS Office. And all of these components will be created and will also upload their finished files directly back to AM assets for centralization and distribution, all while staying in the Office applications they are using.

This reduces time and friction in activating content, enhance reuse of approved content in the dam, and ensure business users are using approved and trusted content with permission and other control in place.

Why did we build this feature? MS Office is and remains one of the most widely used productivity suites by both marketers and business users in almost every organization.

The connector helps users save time in finding approved content for reuse, switching between platforms and making manual copies of content, and maintaining brand consistency by always using approved content. This includes improved content for business documents and presentations.

Workflow support for interactive communication editor.

Customers can now leverage AEM workflow from IC Editor to configure next steps of the business workflow for an associate once they have finished filling the IC. This is a roadmap feature, which was also asked by our customer Xero, NFCU. Customers can configure a workflow model and use that from inside the IC Editor to configure associate UI post submit scenarios.

This is currently in beta phase. Customers can request for it by dropping a mail to AEM-Forms-EA at adobe.com.

Theme editor support for core components. Visually customize form styling without writing code.

Form authors can style any form component, fonts, colors, backgrounds, borders, visually without writing a single line of CSS.

Set a global brand style once and override it for specific components, keeping every form on brand with zero rework. Preview and style forms across mobile, tablet, and desktop in one place. Then share themes across teams as package export.

Versioning support for forms. Track, compare, and restore forms, fragments, styles versions with full audit history.

Form authors can save a named version of any form at any point with a comment describing what changed, creating a clear audit trail. Get automatic versioning when uploading a revised asset. No extra steps, previous versions are always preserved.

Roll back any form, template, or theme style to an earlier version with one click, reducing risk on every update. Next, let’s dig into some optimization enhancements and how they can help you work more efficiently. Today, I will show you how to import and activate a brand.

For instance, here the website’s weekend, I have created a policy brand policy, and I will import this brand policy in the brand management tool. For that, I go to the Expired tab, current context, and I create a brand. So let’s put the name. Good, now we are going here to policies. Continue and browse. So good, we have got the policy I just shown you. Now the policy imported, that can take some time, so we are going to create the domain, the domain that’s authorized to use the domain.

Let’s add one. Good, and let’s wait. It can take some minutes or some hours to have checks. Let’s check a little later. Now, come back. All the checks are here. You can see them on the list of checks. We can edit them, change the category on image or text, and we can check that the policy is activated. Here on the domain we created before, we have to activate it as well. And the brand itself, we have to click on the edit button. For now it’s on the app. So click here. And we can set it as active. So now we’ll be able to use the brand and all the checks to check a page. Let’s do that. So let’s open the AEI Assistant and check for this weekend site we just added the domain before. And after some minutes, we will be able to see the results. That’s concluded this video, how to import an activator brand. In this demo, we will see how to use the new audit view to see effective permissions. So first, a small shortcut to go to the permission. If you’re an experienced servant, you define your profile as admin. You will see on the left side, if you go on the bottom permissions, you just click on it and to select any instance, you will directly be redirected to the permissions.

So that’s the, I would say the old view, you can choose the principal view. If you click on select the principal, you will see the access control list.

So here, if I click on the node view, you can select a node and see the permissions related to a node. That’s something we added end of the last year. Pretty recently, we see the exact access control policy and our local access control policy. Here in the audit view is a little different. You have to select a principal, like, so my name here, I add it, you have to add it, and then you can select one or more paths. You can write it or select it with a small folder button and add it. And here, the difference is you will see the effective permissions. So all the permissions that globally link it to your local control policy or all the policy you have and your role and so on are defined here.

If you click on the include group membership, this will show your group membership, but not only that will as well show your effective permissions related to your group membership. Like here, some of the permissions.

So we have the same in the robo-browser. So let’s go on the robo-browser.

Open developer console, click on robo-browser here, and then we can see we have properties and recently we added permissions. So kind of last year as well, we see no permissions like before on the touch UI. Difference in the robo-browser is a read only, but you can access the publish. And here’s the same, the audit view, you can add a principal. The node is already selected on the left. You can add it, this include group membership or not.

That’s it. Open ID Connect logout feature.

OIDC is an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol that enables robust user authentication while maintaining simplicity for developers. It is widely adopted for business to consumer, B2C, intranet and partner portal scenarios where secure user login and identity federations are required.

The logout feature provides an out of the box standards-based way to securely end user sessions across AEM and the connected identity provider. This reduces the risk of orphaned or shared sessions, improves protection for sensitive customer and employee data and delivers a more predictable, consistent logout experience.

For customers, this means stronger security posture with less custom implementation effort and a better overall authentication experience that aligns with enterprise security expectations.

Finally, let’s take a look at how Agentic AI is evolving and the ways these new features can handle more of the heavy lifting for you.

In this cursor IDE, customer code is opened. To set up the cloud manager MCP, go to settings under the tools in MCP. Please add the MCP URL in the config. After enabling and clicking the connect button, AuthFlow is started and redirect user on browser to log in user.

Put the credentials, select the IMS org and redirect back to cursor. Now auth is completed. An MCP is enabled with authentication and user can now use cloud manager MCP tools. Let’s try to fetch all the programs that user has access in the IMS org.

It calls cloud manager tools and get the program details. Let’s fetch the environment details in a program. Now we can see user has two environments in this program. Let’s try to check the last three pipeline executions in this program.

It called tools to fetch the pipeline first and then fetches the execution of the pipeline. We can see one pipeline execution has the failed status.

Can we check the logs from here? Let’s ask cursor to fetch the logs. We can see the logs of that failed pipeline inside the IDE itself. Now user asks cursor to start the pipeline from here as is a write and destructive operation. There is an extra user verification check. A pop-up window is opened and user need to put the pipeline name to start the deployment. Now pipeline is running. Hence this MCP could be very useful to manage program environment pipeline from the IDE.

Pause maintenance updates.

This feature ensures that critical business events like go live or sales events are not interrupted by maintenance release updates. Customers gain control over their maintenance schedule directly in cloud manager. You can protect specific hours every day or block updates entirely for up to three times one week a year without waiting for request approval.

Setting up update free periods and quiet hours is now straightforward with the agent.

It guides you through the process, reviews your choices and saves only when you confirm.

We built this to eliminate the friction of the manual exception process. That old system was slow and created unnecessary stress for customers right before their most important work windows.

We wanted to move away from a model that required Adobe approval for every change. This update gives that power back to the customer so they can manage their own stability without any middleman.

These are settings you don’t wanna get wrong. The agent makes sure you understand what you’re figuring and gives you a chance to confirm before locking anything in. To show a quick demo of how we can apply changes to the page itself as opposed to duplicating the page as we’re doing today.

So this is the page that I’m gonna be modifying.

So I’ll hop into the assistant and I’ll just put in a short prompt here.

So on the author page change the ViewTrip CTA to something more engaging.

And so here in launches, we don’t have a launch created for this page yet and that is something that we will add. Although launches, the concept is abstracted from the agent interface so that we don’t need to worry the end user about that. Okay, so it came back that we were successfully able to change this so let’s open up the preview. And we can say the Start Your Adventure.

Now if we open it up in the editor, we’ll notice that this page is part of a launch and Start Your Adventure here.

And if we open up, refresh this, here is our new launch. And so if we’re happy with these changes, we can say Accept and this is going to promote that change. All right, so this has been updated. If we go to this original page, ViewTrips, and if we refresh this, now you can see this has been promoted. And now from here, the user can manually publish this page. Thank you.

These updates are all about helping you move faster, work better together, and deliver smarter experiences at scale. Head over to Experience League for the full release notes and be sure to like and subscribe to stay in the loop.

Thanks for watching. See you in the next one.