User Interface Recommendations for Customers

Adobe Experience Manager 6.3 comes with two UIs - the unified Experience Cloud UI and the Classic UI.

This document is intended to guide customers to make a choice on what UI to use depending their situation.

Terms of interest:

• Classic UI
  User interface based on ExtJS technology that was introduced with CQ 5.1 in 2008.
• UI (or default UI)
  New(er) user interface that was introduced in 5.6.0 as a technology preview and extended in subsequent releases. It is based on the unified user experience for the Adobe Experience Cloud.
• Site Admin
  Capabilities to manage the site hierarchy (move, activate, managed references) and create new pages.
• Page Authoring
  Capabilities to add/edit the content of a page.
• DAM/Assets Admin
  Capabilities to manage digital assets (including images, video, documents, downloads).
• Client Context
  Capabilities to aggregate information about the visitor and use it for various purposes. Provides an user interface to simulate persons visiting the site. Starting AEM 6.2, ContextHub is replacing the Client Context.
  

Over the last few years Adobe has updated all the Adobe Experience Cloud solutions with an unified user interface. Users across the Experience Cloud solutions enjoy a consistant experience with common patterns on how to use and operate the applications. With every release, Adobe has refined it's user interface based on feedback from customers working across the various solutions.

The original user interface for Adobe Experience Manager (previously known as CQ5), introduced in 2008 and used by customers running versions 5.0-5.6.1, is present in AEM 6.3. This guarantees that customers can update to 6.3, and benefit from an updated platform with new capabilities while keep using the same user interface.

Adobe recommends customers to plan to switch to the new UI in 2017/18. This can either be done during the update to 6.3 - or in a separate projects after the update, that would include the necessary adjustments to the customizations and component dialogs.

Adobe is planning to deprecate the Classic UI in AEM in April 2018. The 2018 release of AEM will still contain the Classic UI as it is part of current AEM release. Following that, Adobe is planning to remove the Classic UI from AEM in April 2019.

Customers running AEM 6.3 will benefit from full production support using the classic user interface.

The following is a list of recommendations from Product Management for Adobe Experience Manager 6.3:

See the Knowledge Base article, Touch UI Authoring FAQ, for details; including any information about the deprecation schedule for the classic UI.

See Selecting Your UI for information about configuring your system as required.

For details of the enhancements made to the touch-optimized UI in the AEM 6.3 see What's New in the Release Notes.

A complete overview see the Touch UI Feature Status page

For background information on basic handling:

• Working with the Author environment.
• Authoring Pages.

For detailed development information:

• Touch-optimized UI architecture.
• Use the Dialog Conversion tool to convert component Edit dialogs from the classic UI to the touch-optimized UI.
  
• Structure of the touch-optimized UI.
  
• Customizing the consoles in the touch-optimized UI (includes sample code).
  
• Customizing page authoring in the touch-optimized UI (includes sample code).
  
• AEM Gem Session on touch-optimized customization.
• Granite UI documentation.