I recently attended a webinar on the new translation features coming as a part of the AEM 6.2 beta program and am very excited for the following four features:

Search for Translation Content

In the initial version of the Translation API, available in AEM 6.1, adding translated content was a very broad activity. Essentially, the process was adding an entire content tree to be translated then if you wanted to limit the content being translated removing it item by item.

Now in AEM 6.2, you can leverage the powerful search features available in AEM to find content to be translated by last modification, page metadata or analytics information. This allows you to quickly refine down to the most important or most recently edited content and send it to translation.

Do Not Translate Configurations

Sometimes you want to be able to exclude certain portions of a website from being translated. To handle this in AEM 6.2, Adobe added the ability to create Do Not Translate configurations. These can then be associated with content by overriding the Cloud Configurations for a portion of a website. When the translation feature encounters a Do Not Translate configuration it will exclude that page and subpages from the translation process.

This allows authors to easily exclude website content from translation without having to involve developers or modifying the translation rules.

Override Source Language Warning

When I implemented the AEM – Lingotek translation integration, one of the biggest complaints we had was that the warning for when you were going to override the source language copy was not obvious enough. This dialog would appear if you say attempted to translate the English copy of a website to French. In AEM 6.1 this opened a fairly bland dialog, where as in AEM 6.2 this opens a clear warning and now allows you to create a Language Copy directly from the warning dialog.

i18n Translation

One of the big misses in the original translation feature in AEM 6.1 was translating i18n dictionaries. Now in AEM 6.2, the translation feature will automatically queue i18n dictionaries into the translation job when you translate a page.

Bonus (Existing) Feature: Translation Rules

If you were wondering how to manage component or attribute translation rules, AEM includes a Translation Rules configuration. This offers you very fine grained control over what is sent to translation, but unfortunately there is currently no UI for managing the rules. This is expected in either a 6.2 feature pack or 6.3.

To update the Translation Rules, edit the file stored in AEM at /etc/workflow/models/translation/translation_rules.xml

I am very excited to show Perficient’s demo for Adobe Summit. We have created a mobile app based on the Adobe Digital Marketing technologies outlined in my AEM Mobile blog post. This app brings together many parts of Adobe Experience Manager and the Adobe Marketing Cloud to produce a mobile app that can be easily authored by non-technical users. So how did we pull this off?

Step 1: Perficient Digital’s Design and Front End Coding

Our process started by leveraging Perficient’s strong design capabiities to create the experience based on our branding at Adobe Summit. Olivia, one of our designers created the designs, iterated on the designs with our digital marketing team and then delivered the finished designs within a single week.

Next, one of our skilled Multi-Shoring Solution Architects, Scott, picked up these design comps and translated them into workable HTML wireframes.

Step 2: Perficient Digital’s AEM Implementation

Once we had the design created, we implemented the app inside of AEM Mobile. Our developers and architects, including Anton, Harini and Eddie, implemented this application inside of AEM using the Angular framework.

From the AEM interface, authors can easily maintain content, publish content and release the app.

Step 3: Perficient Digital’s Analytics Implementation

As the AEM team was completing the app code, Ryan, one of our analytics experts, analyzed the application’s interactions, created an analytics tracking plan and implemented the tracking using Adobe Analytics and Adobe Digital Tag Manager. Using the powerful reporting features in Adobe Analytics, we are able to visualize user interactions in real time at the booth.

Step 4: Success!

After weeks of development, we are excited to show the new app at Adobe Summit. We will have laptops and Kindle Fires available to show the authoring interface and the app. Stop by our booth at Adobe Summit to see it in person!

Recently, Adobe introduced AEM Mobile, a new way to build, maintain and deploy mobile apps. AEM Mobile makes it vastly easier to manage mobile apps by enabling marketers to maintain mobile app content, which has traditionally been done by developers. AEM Mobile is the centerpiece of a new platform Adobe has built around enabling marketing to maintain mobile apps and market to mobile app users.

As one of Adobe’s top partners, Perficient had a chance to preview AEM Mobile and get a glimpse into the technology underlying this new platform.

The Tech Behind the Scenes

This new platform is composed of several different technologies, each of which has been deeply integrated, to build a seamless mobile app publishing experience.

Bringing it all Together

By combining all of these technologies into a single platform, Adobe has created a mobile app platform with unparalleled features, flexibility and ease of use. No longer should mobile apps be separate from the rest of your digital marketing technology or should they be unmeasured or un-marketed. By leveraging, AEM Mobile you can build and maintain more apps and derive more value out of every dollar you put into mobile.

Perficient is extremely excited by the possibilities offered by AEM Mobile and for Adobe Summit, we have some very special demos planned to demonstrate the potential of the platform. Stay tuned for the second part of this blog series for more information!

What is Live Copy?

Live Copy is a feature in Adobe Experience Manager where the content and structure of a source site is copied to target sites via a configurable process. This can either be automatic or manual, and can even invoke other processes like automatic publication workflows upon changes to the source site.

As shown in the illustration above, a source site (or blueprint) contains the base content and structure. The Live Copied sites (Local Branch 1 and Local Branch 2) will receive updates with the shared content, which is shown in red. The blue content is created for each individual local site and will not be shared with the blueprint site or the other local sites. This same process can act within a page, allowing authors to add, change or remove pieces of content on a page while preserving the live copy link for the rest of the page content. Live Copies can also be Live Copied allowing the creation of multiple blueprints, for example, creating a region or service focused blueprint versus the default generic blueprint.

Live Copy Process

The process for creating a live copy is simple. First, an author would log into Adobe Experience Manager and select + Create >> Create Live Copy from the Sites Manager.

Next, the author will select the source or blueprint site:

Then select the destination path, which is the path under which the live copy target site will be created:

Finally, the author enters the site title, name and rollout configurations. The rollout configurations are hooks which are executed by Live Copy on certain event triggers to perform updates to the target site or other actions. For more information, check out this article on creating Rollout Configurations. The two rollout configurations I have selected below will update the content of the Live Copy target when the Live Copy is first executed (Standard rollout config) and update the target whenever there is a modification to the source (Push on modify).

When the author clicks create, the new site will be created and linked back to the source site via Live Copy. From there the content can be managed similarly to any other AEM content and the authors can choose to override any Live Copied page content via canceling inheritance.

You can find more documentation about Live Copy on the Adobe documentation website. If you are facing the problem of managing a large number of similar, but not quite the same websites in Adobe Experience Manager, Live Copy can be the solution to your challenges.