General Release Notes for Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 general-release-notes-for-adobe-experience-manager

Release Information release-information

Trivia trivia

The release cycle for this version of Adobe Experience Manager started April 27, 2017, went through 22 iterations of quality assurance and bug fixing, and ended on March 22nd, 2018. The total number of customer related issues including enhancements and new features fixed in this release is 704.

Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 is generally available since April 4, 2018.

What’s new what-s-new

Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 is an upgrade release to the Adobe Experience Manager 6.3 code base. It provides new and enhanced functionality, key customer fixes, high priority customer enhancements and general bug fixes oriented toward product stabilization. It also includes the majority of all Adobe Experience Manager 6.3 feature packs, hot fix, and service pack releases.

The list below provides an overview - while the subsequent pages list the full details.

Experience Manager Foundation experience-manager-foundation

Full list of changes in AEM Foundation.

The platform of Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 build on top of updated versions of the OSGi-based framework (Apache Sling and Apache Felix) and the Java Content Repository: Apache Jackrabbit Oak 1.8.2.

The Quickstart uses Eclipse Jetty 9.3.22 as servlet engine.

User Interface user-interface

Various enhancements have been made to the UI to make it more productive and easier to use.

See the Authoring documentation for more information on these features.

Content Repository content-repository

Search & Indexing search-indexing

For more information, please visit this documentation page.

Monitoring monitoring

Projects and Workflows projects-and-workflows

Upgrade from earlier version upgrade-from-earlier-version

Experience Manager Sites experience-manager-sites

Full list of changes in AEM Sites and Add-ons.

Fluid Experiences fluid-experiences

The introduction of Fluid Experiences at the start of 2017, backed by Content Fragments, Experience Fragments and Content Services were the start to evolve to a multi-channel-first content management. AEM 6.4 extends each of the areas significantly:

Content Fragments

New in 6.4 are a visual content model editor and a new configurable component to provide flexible HTML output and JSON to include in Content Services.

Experience Fragments

Creating variations in a fragment with the same content but different layout is now more efficient, thanks to the Building Blocks capability. On top of sending Experience Fragments to Facebook and Pinterest, now it’s possible to send them to Adobe Target as offer.

Content Services

Various enhancements to Sling Model Exporter and the Core Components are included to provide a robust JSON output to embed content in mobile apps and experiences build with single-page apps.

Getting Sites Built Quicker gettings-sites-built-quicker

AEM 6.4 completes the transformation to the next generation component model. The Core Components concept introduced in AEM 6.3, and now joined by the Style System, provides an efficient way to build new and extend existing sites.

Recommended tutorial to learn on how to best leverage the new component model: Getting Started with AEM Sites - WKND Tutorial

Screens Add-on screens-add-on

Delivering a consistent message across all marketing channels including Digital Signage and kiosk networks is what AEM Screens stands for. AEM 6.4 adds support to run the Signage Player on Microsoft Windows and Google Chrome OS hardware. Further, enhancements to remote device management and schedules (groups of channels) are available.

For more information on the Screens updates, see AEM Screens User Guide.

Experience Manager Communities experience-manager-communities

AEM 6.4 adds many new features and enhancements to Communities. Full list of changes is available in AEM Communities. Highlights for this release are:

Enhancements to Moderation enhancements-to-moderation

Automatic spam detection

New spam detection engine has been provided to filter out unwanted user generated content on community sites and groups. Once enabled from system/console/configMgr, it marks a piece of user generated content as spam based on a pre-defined set of spam words. To know more about spam detection engine, refer automoderating community user generating content.

New filters for QnA

New filters, named Answered and Not Answered, have been added to bulk moderation console to filter QnA questions. To know how the Answered and Unanswered status filters work, refer bulk moderating user generated content.

Bookmark moderation filters

Ability to bookmark the pre-defined moderation filters on moderation console has been provided. These filters are appended toward the end of the URL string, therefore can be shared, reused and revisited later. Know how to bookmark filters in bulk moderation console.

Delete UGC and user profiles delete-ugc-and-user-profiles

AEM 6.4 Communities exposes out-of-the-box APIs and sample servlet to enable end users have control over their data. These APIs also enable data processing and data controlling organizations to serve EU GDPR compliance requests.

Enhancements to Site and Group Management enhancements-to-site-and-group-management

Create multi-locale groups in a single step

Capability to create multi-lingual groups in single operation has been provided. To create such groups, users can navigate to Group Collection of the desired communities site from the Sites console. Create a group, and specify the desired languages in Community Group Template page. To know more about this functionality, refer community groups console.

Delete community sites and groups in a click

Delete icon is now available on respective sites and groups, while navigating from global navigation. Using this icon deletes all the items and content associated with the site or group, and removes all the user associations. To know more about this functionality, refer managing community sites and managing community groups.

Enhancements to Enablement enhancements-to-enablement

Assignment and Catalog functions are now available within groups. This enables learning content to be created, managed and published for a specific set of targeted community members. To know more about enabling community groups, refer managing enablement resources.

Experience Manager Assets experience-manager-assets

AEM 6.4 brings in several new features and enhancements to Assets including new, improved CreativeCloud integration, key Artificial Intelligence innovations, improved metadata management, reporting enhancements, and overall user experience improvements. The full list of changes available in AEM Assets. The highlights of the release are:

Adobe Asset Link

Adobe Asset Link in Creative Cloud for enterprise streamlines collaboration between creatives and marketers in the content creation process. It is a new native capability in Creative Cloud for enterprise that connects Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign to AEM — without creatives having to leave their tools of choice.

To learn more about this capability, prerequisites, and how to access it, see Adobe Asset Link.

AEM desktop app

AEM desktop app has been updated to Version 1.8, which is compatible with AEM 6.4. The full list of changes for AEM desktop app is provided in a dedicated AEM desktop app release notes document.

Improvements introduced since the AEM 6.3 release include the ability to upload hierarchical folders in the background, a new UI to monitor asset background operations, enhanced caching, networking and login, as well as overall stability improvements. The documentation also includes a best practices guide.

Adobe Sensei Services

New capabilities include Enhanced Smart Tags, with the ability to learn customer business taxonomy, automatically tag digital assets with customer-specific tags and Smart Translation Search, which improves discoverability in multiple languages by translating search terms on the fly. To learn more about this feature, see Enhanced Smart Tags.

Metadata

Various enhancements include the ability to import and export metadata simultaneously for large numbers of assets and advanced metadata constructs, such as Cascading Metadata.

Reports

Asset reporting underwent a big overhaul in AEM 6.4 with new reporting framework, user experience, and more OOTB reports for customer use cases. To learn how to generate various reports, see Asset Reports.

User Experience

Multiple enhancements to improve browsing, searching and admin experience for Assets users such as scrolling experience, search back button, improved search filters and many more. The full list available in AEM Assets.

Brand Portal

Various enhancements in areas of metadata, reporting, digital rights, login experience, and publish performance for asset distribution. To know about the new enhancements and features, see What’s new in AEM Assets Brand Portal.

Dynamic Media Add-on dynamic-media-add-on

AEM 6.4 includes many new features and enhancements to Dynamic Media. The full list is available in AEM Assets. Key highlights include the following:

Smart Crop

Smart Crop, powered by Adobe Sensei, automatically provides non-destructive cropping of images, preserving the point of interest for responsive design. You can preview cropped image suggestions and manually adjust them, if necessary. This feature also enables automated swatch generation for product imagery.

See Image Profiles documentation to learn more about using Smart Crop.

See Adding Dynamic Media Assets to Pages to learn more about working with Smart Crop in the Dynamic Media component.

Smart Imaging

Smart imaging leverages each user’s unique viewing characteristics to automatically serve images optimized for their experience, resulting in better performance and engagement.

See Smart Imaging documentation to learn more.

Emerging Media & Viewer Enhancements

New viewers, including Panoramic and VR, let you provide more immersive experiences.

See Panoramic Images documentation to learn more.

Experience Manager Forms experience-manager-forms

AEM 6.4 Forms brings in several new features and enhancements. The highlights include:

More details on AEM Forms release notes page. Also, see the Summary of new features and enhancements in AEM 6.4 Forms for information about new and improved features and documentation resources.

Experience Manager Livefyre experience-manager-livefyre

You can integrate Livefyre with your AEM 6.4 instance. Information on how to integrate Livefyre with AEM is located here:

Leverage Customer Focused Development leverage-customer-focused-development

Adobe is using a customer focused development model that allows customers to contribute to all stages of the development process, during specification, development and testing. Our thanks goes to all contributing customers and partners in this process.

Adobe has the procedures and processes in place to enable collection, prioritization, and tracking of customer focused bug resolution and enhancement request development. The Adobe Marketing Cloud Support Portal is integrated with the Adobe Enhancement & Defect Tracking System. Customer questions are identified and resolved with Customer Care where possible. When escalated to R&D, all customer information is captured, and used for prioritization and reporting purposes. Priority is given in development to paid support and warrantee issues and paid customer enhancements.

This process of prioritization has yielded more than 500 customer focused changes fixed in AEM 6.4.

List of files that are part of the Release list-of-files-that-are-part-of-the-release

Foundation

Sites

Assets

Forms

Languages languages

The user interface is available in following languages:

Experience Manager 6.4 has been certified for GB18030-2005 CITS to use the Chinese Encoding Standard.

Install & Update install-update

See installation instructions for setup requirements.

Please see upgrade documentation for detailed instructions.

Supported Platforms supported-platforms

Please find the complete matrix of supported platforms incl. Support-Level on AEM 6.4 Technical Requirements.

Deprecated and Removed Features deprecated-and-removed-features

Adobe constantly evaluates capabilities in the product and over time plans to replace capabilities with more powerful versions, or decides to re-implemented selected parts to be better prepared for future expectations or extensions.

For Adobe Experience Manager 6.4, read the list of deprecated and removed capabilities. The page also contains pre-announcement of changes in 2019 and important notice for customers that update from prior releases.

Detailed Changes Lists detailed-changes-lists

AEM Sites

AEM Assets

AEM Communities

AEM Forms

AEM Foundation

Known Issues known-issues

List of known issues

Product Download and Support (Restricted Sites) product-download-and-support-restricted-sites

These sites are only available to customers. If you are a customer and need access, please contact your Adobe account manager.