Developing Page Content in AEM for a Future Release - Launches

We've had a requirement that has come from a customer who has basically said...

Each region/section of the home page is modified by a different content owner. They make changes independently of each other and they would like to have their region/section published independently.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a page-centric content management system at its core. You build pages from templates and components. There are other CMS's, such as OpenText Web Experience Manager (WEM) that are content-centric. You build content items and assign them to channels and/or a template to build a page.

Our customer has been using a content-centric CMS for almost a decade and old habits die slow. There has been a huge push to get things working "like the old system".

When you dig to the root of this requirement, what they are really after is a way to efficiently develop the content on an activated page for a future release while still maintaining the production content. That's where AEM has offered Launches!

To create a Launch from the Touch UI console, navigate to any page within the Sites Menu, click on Create > Create Launch. There is no need to navigate to the page that you want to create a Launch for as you are forced to navigate to it through the Launch Wizard. Navigate through to your page and click Next.

There are two main options when creating a launch; to create the launch with existing content or to create a launch using a new template to replace the page.

If you create a launch using a new template, you are creating a new page with a new template that will replace the existing page. The final step you are asked to select the new template before you create the launch.

If you select to use existing content then you can select to exclude sub pages and/or inherit source page live data. By default sub pages are copied over as part of a launch. Check the exclude sub pages box if you do not want the sub pages to be included as part of a launch. Inheriting source page live data is a feature that allows you to treat the launch page in the same way as a Live Copy page. Checking this option allows the launch page to stay in sync with any changes made to the source/live page unless you cancel inheritance.

The References section shows you how many Launches are associated with a page. To work with the content within a Launch, select the page and click References > Launches > Launch Title > Go to the page. This will open up the Launch Page.

If you have select to inherit the source page live data, you will need to Cancel inheritance on any component you want to modify. If the page does not inherit the source page live data, you can just change the page at will.

Launches also allow you to create a Nested Launches (Launch within a Launch). This is a very powerful feature but can also become very complicated! The key thing is that inheritance works from the point where it has been cancelled or from the source page. Sub Launches are labelled as the Launch Title (Parent Launch Title).

To promote a Launch, select the page and click References > Launches > Launch Title > Promote launch. From here you can specify the Scope (to promote the full launch or just the page changes and sub pages) and you can specify the Target if this is a Nested Launch. After the promotion has run, you can publish the page changes.

To delete a Launch from the Touch UI console, navigate to Tools > Operations > Launches. This will take you back into the Classic UI console. From here you can select and delete a configured Launch.