General Release Notes for Adobe Experience Manager 6.2

The release cycle for this version of Adobe Experience Manager started May 21, 2015, went through 21 iterations of quality assurance and bug fixing, and ended April 6th, 2016. The total number of customer related issues including enhancements and new features fixed in this release is 972.

Adobe Experience Manager 6.2 is generally available since April 21, 2016.

Adobe Experience Manager 6.2 is an upgrade release to the Adobe Experience Manager 6.1 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 all Adobe Experience Manager 6.1 feature pack, hot fix, and service pack releases.

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

The platform of Adobe Experience Manager 6.2 build on top of updated versions of the OSGi-based framework (Apache Sling and Apache Felix) and the Java Content Repository: Apache Jackrabbit Oak
1.4.1.

The Quickstart uses the Eclipse Jetty 9.2.14 as servlet engine.

Security features:

• Added support for password history
• Configurable authentication token expiration
• Ongoing effort: Switched usage of the Sling loginAdministrative API to Service Users it various areas of the product.
• Dispatcher IP masked in SurferInfoMgr.

SPLC (Secure Product Life Cycle) in Product Engineering

• 100% technical staff with advanced security training
• Reviewed and approved security questionnaires for all new capabilities
• New and improved static code analysis
• Several external penetration tests (including BugCrowd)

Main repository enhancements are:

• Support for MongoDB Enterprise 3.2
• Cold standby enhancements to support a procedural failover for high availability in TarMK
• Oak search enhancements like Faceted Search, Suggestions, Spellchecker and more
• Performance, Scalability and Resilience in general
• Revision Cleanup Support:
  • Offline revision cleanup is the recommended way of performing revision cleanup. Support for Online revision cleanup in AEM 6.2 is restricted (Support-Level 'R'). For more guidelines please see Choosing the Type of Revision Cleanup.

AEM 6.2 implements the 2016 Adobe Marketing Cloud UI design (also known as Shell 3). Further - the user interface is in transition from Coral UI 2 to the Web Component based Coral 3 UI library.

The product navigation has moved from the side rail to an overlay and provides access to the product areas - and the tools.

The search experience was elevated to allow navigating within the product and search all areas of the product. Use the / key to open the search.

Further:

• the actions and selection mode have been refined for better productivity.
• the location for the 'Create' actions as been aligned

Some feature highlights:

• "Explain Query" provides insight to the mechanics of your queries to support diagnosis and optimization
• Specific repository aspects can be monitored on a configurable timeline view in the Tools/Operations section.
• A configurable series of Java thread dumps can be downloaded now with the Status.zip from the Tools/Operations/Diagnosis section. 
• User Sync Diagnostics to support consistency for User/Groups across AEM instances.

Content Distribution - the next generation content replication capability - was 1st introduced in AEM 6.1. With AEM 6.2, additional supported use cases were added:

• Package replication to support extra large activation volumes
• Priority-Queuing configuration to allow split between urgent activations and backlog
• Auto-unlocking stuck replication queues incl advanced notifications

Content Distribution comes with an UI in the Tools/Deployment section.

AEM 6.2 introduces support for:

•   Repository Persistence on:

• MongoDB Enterprise 3.2
• MySQL 5.6 (AEM Forms only - Support-Level 'R')
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (AEM Forms only - Support-Level 'R')

•   Application Server

• Oracle WebLogic Server 12.2 (12cR2)

•   Server OS                  

• Debian Distribution incl. Ubuntu 14

Please find the complete matrix of supported platforms incl. Support-Level on AEM 6.2 Technical Requirements.

More details on the AEM Platform & Repository release notes page.

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 6.2.

• Standalone Quickstart: cq-quickstart-6.2.0.jar
• Application Server Quickstart: cq-quickstart-6.2.0.war
• Dispatcher 4.1.12 or newer for various web servers and platforms (download link)
  Package for extended RAW image support
  • cq-dam-cameraraw-content
• Adobe Experience Manager Desktop App (f.k.a. Companion App (Read more and download)
• Packages for AEM Forms capabilities:
  • adobe-aemfd-aix-pkg
  • adobe-aemfd-linux-pkg
  • adobe-aemfd-solaris-pkg
  • adobe-aemfd-win-pkgcq-geometrixx-gov-all-pkg
• AEM Screens Players for various target platforms (download)
• Packages for Hybris e-commerce integration (Available on request)
  Maven/Gradle dependencies (download link)
• Reference implementation (Read more and download)
• Plug-in for Eclipse IDE (Read more and download)
  Extension for Brackets Code Editor (Read more and download)
• Project Blueprint Archetype (GitHub project)

The user interface is available in following languages:

• English
• German
• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• Brazilian
• Portuguese
• Japanese
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese (limited support)
• Korean

Experience Manager 6.2 has been certified for GB18030-2005 CITS to use the Chinese Encoding Standard.

See installation instructions for setup requirements.

Please see upgrade documentation for detailed instructions.

In order to see what platforms are certified to run with this release, please refer to the Supported platforms list.

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 6.2, read the list of deprecated and removed capabilities. The page also contains pre-announcement of changes in 2017 and important notice for customers that update from prior releases.

• AEM Sites
• AEM Assets
• AEM Communities
• AEM Forms
• AEM Mobile
• AEM Platform & Repository

List of Known Issues

• Adobe Experience Manager Product Page on adobe.com
• Deprecated Features

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

• Product Download at licensing.adobe.com