Digital Plunge - have you already taken the plunge?

Users are contributing content more than ever before, and it's getting difficult for Enterprise systems to manage it. To cope up with this, Adobe keeps evolving their UGC ecosystem. I think it was called  Social Collaboration tool  before CQ 5.5 After CQ 5.5 it was called  Social Communities  (So-Co),  this was shortened to So-Co. With AEM 6, this was rebranded as AEM Communities. At that point, all UGC components functionality was moved into Communities from AEM. So forums, comments/ratings etc. With 6.2, the concept of a central store was introduced, so content was saved outside of AEM in a central location where all instances would read and write, this can be Mongo, or JCR (but only for single instances) or it can be cloud storage (better name than social storage) which as you know carries a cost. And then Adobe overtook another product named Livefyre which is managed comments and other UGC content in a SAAS ki

Recently I worked on one of the major enterprise project in Adobe for upgrading AEM from 5.6.1 to 6.2. It took me and my team almost 10 months to upgrade this enterprise system, due to the complexity of the project. After working on multiple upgrade projects on AEM now, I feel that even though Adobe documentation does provide lots of help, but there is still a huge difference in plan, timelines (may vary from 4 weeks to 10 months), and execution for each project (completely depends on the current architecture and topologies). I am trying to consolidate my experience and learnings on these projects in my blog. Hope it will be helpful for some of you planning for AEM upgrade I will cover each phase separately as below Kickoff, Planning & estimation Analysis/assessment/discovery workshop Actual upgradation   Post upgrade Activities Performance tuning activities Go live & Cutover Maintenance activities

There are many situations when you need to compare two AEM instances. The easiest approach is to compare packages, bundles and configurations. Here is how you can do it - Compare package managers  http://localhost:4502/crx/packmgr/service.jsp?cmd=ls Compare Bundles  http://localhost:4502/system/console/bundles.json Compare Configurations  http://localhost:4502/system/console/status-Configurations Compare system properties  http://localhost:4502/system/console/status-System%20Properties You can then compare these manually using any text comparers. Another quicker approach is to compare those using below tools by Aemstuff.com - http://www.aemstuff.com/tools/cti.html http://www.aemstuff.com/tools/coi.html

Many of my friends keep asking me to provide some interview questions related with SDL Tridion . Surprisingly, there are hardly any site available for questions related with SDL Tridion., though you can find host of sites for other WCMs like AEM and Sitecore. Hence, I thought to put some basic Tridion related questions on the basis of my experience with it. I know it may require several improvements but thought to share something for someone who is looking to get some Tridion related questions to start with. I will be glad to incorporate any suggestion you have. Development phases related questions - What is the development methodology recommended by SDL for development/integration based on SDL Tridion? Have you participated in any Blueprinting workshop, please share the experience? What are the inputs required in BluePrint? How can inheritance of content flow be altered explicitly? What are priority and ranking in Blueprint? What are the inputs required for Content Modeling

Alvin Toffler, renowned American author, known also for his works discussing the "Digital revolution" once said " The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. " Hello, At outset of my career I chose not to be modern illiterate :) hence I keep learning aggressively whenever I get chance, keep unlearning what is not relevant and keep relearning stuffs whenever required . With learning as a prominent goal in mind, I had a hectic but really productive learning weekends recently. It started with two days' workshop (24-25th July) on "High Impact Presentation" by Dale Carnegie Training conducted by Mindtree. Then two days' workshop (8-9th August) on "Extreme Programming Conference" by industry experts again conducted by Mindtree and finally attended "Judges Training Program" on 10th August conducted by Toastmasters International. Out of

Large portion of a developer work in any Web content management tool is to display content. Here are the three ways to do so in AEM/CQ5 - 1. Through Properties Object - The properties object is an instance of the ValueMap class and contains all properties of the current resource. For example - properties.get("jcr:title") 2. Through Current Page Object – The currentPage object is an instance of the Page class, which provides some methods to access content. For example - currentPage.getTitle() 3. Through Current Node Object – The currentNode object is an instance of the Node which provides access to content via the getProperty() method. For example - currentNode.getProperty("jcr:title").getString() Here is the complete code snippet for trying all these three options Let’s test this script by requesting a page in Site Admin that implements this “Page component”. Thank you!