AEM Champion Office Hours: AEM Workflows (July 2023)

In this AEM Champion Office Hours session on AEM workflows, moderated by Jessica, a panel of AEM Champions, including RENY director Rami El Gamal, Brett Birschbach, Greg Dimeris and Max Barrass, answered questions about approvals, permissions, bulk processing and how workflows change in AEM as a Cloud Service.

What the session covers

• Monitoring workflows: what to track depends on what the workflow does, from author approvals to calls to external systems.
• Permissions and preview: keeping content private before it goes live.
• Bulk processing: running workflows on folders with millions of images without hurting performance.
• Publishing together: making sure a page and its assets, Content Fragments and Experience Fragments go live as one.
• ACS AEM Commons: how to answer security teams that are wary of open source.
• Cloud Service: how asset processing and workflows differ from on-premise and Managed Services.

Key takeaways

• Define the workflow before you monitor it. An approval step needs a different kind of tracking than a step that calls an external service, such as clearing a CDN cache, and has to confirm success or failure.
• Assign permissions to groups, never to individual users. One-to-one mappings become unmanageable over time.
• Use the preview tier for review. In AEM as a Cloud Service, publish to preview, restrict access by IP allowlist, and publish to production after approval.
• Throttle bulk operations. On-premise, ACS AEM Commons bulk tools can batch the work. In the cloud, use supported alternatives, and make sure bulk actions do not trigger cascades of extra workflows.
• Group related content. Options include tree activation, packages (useful when compliance requires an exact, auditable set), launches, or a custom workflow step that takes several resource paths as one payload.
• ACS AEM Commons is a reasonable risk. It is open source and maintained by experienced AEM developers. If a client still objects, fork it or copy only the features you need.
• Asset processing moved out of AEM. In Cloud Service, renditions are created by asset microservices, so large reprocessing jobs no longer slow the instance. The old DAM Update Asset customizations are replaced by processing profiles on folders.

RENY's perspective

A workflow is a systematic set of steps from point A to point B, and approval is only one use case. For clients with Akamai in front of AEM, we have built steps that clear the CDN cache and record which pages succeeded or failed. To publish a page together with its assets and fragments, we suggest a custom workflow step that accepts multiple paths as a single payload. For cautious security teams in banks and healthcare, the alternative to ACS AEM Commons is several sprints of rebuilding the same features. And in Cloud Service, our number one point is that rendition generation no longer affects performance, but you will need processing profiles and may need to update components that rely on custom rendition names.

What's changed since 2023

• AEM 6.5 LTS is now available for teams staying on-premise or on Managed Services, while AEM as a Cloud Service remains Adobe's main platform.
• AI features have arrived in Cloud Service first, as the panel expected, including AI-assisted authoring and smart tagging in AEM Assets.
• Asset processing profiles and Content Hub have matured, which makes the move away from custom DAM workflows easier.

How RENY helps

We design AEM workflows, permissions and asset processing that scale, and migrate custom workflows to AEM as a Cloud Service. Talk to an AEM architect.