AEM Champion Office Hours: 2024 Kick-off (February 2024)

The February 2024 session opened the year's AEM Champion Office Hours, co-hosted by RENY director Rami El Gamal and Greg Dimeris. The 2024 class of AEM Champions grew from fewer than 20 members to more than 100, so the hosts explained how monthly sessions would work, what topics were planned, and then answered live questions.

What the session covers

• How Office Hours work: monthly, interactive "ask me anything" sessions for authors, architects and developers, with questions submitted in advance or live in the chat.
• Topics for 2024: AEM Forms, caching and performance, Adobe Experience Platform integrations, AI use cases with AEM, Cloud Manager, AEM as a Cloud Service and Edge Delivery Services, covering both business and technical angles.
• Adobe Summit 2024: the AEM Champions' Idea Bar, where attendees bring real problems for on-the-spot architecture help.
• Community: the AEM User Groups chapters page, Adobe Experience League, and new local user groups.

Key takeaways

• Fix the cause of absolute links, not just the symptom. When content sync leaves absolute links pointing at the wrong environment, find out why authors are creating them; if you must rewrite them in AEM as a Cloud Service, use a job, listener or resource resolver mapping, because Groovy scripts are not available there.
• Move to the latest AEM archetype when going to the cloud. It standardizes the Dispatcher configuration, the front-end module and the SDK dependencies. Moving client libraries into the ui.frontend module is not required for a migration, but it avoids two competing front-end setups later.
• Cloud Manager alerts in Slack or Teams: have Adobe I/O Events push pipeline notifications to a servlet on your development author instance, which then posts to Slack or Teams, with no extra infrastructure.
• Core Components upgrade with the SDK in AEM as a Cloud Service. Older component versions (such as v2 alongside v3) stay available, but the shared Java code still changes, so regression-test custom components after each upgrade.

RENY's perspective

We answered the four technical questions above in the session. We see Office Hours as a complement to Adobe Experience League: instead of waiting for written answers, practitioners can talk a problem through live with people who have solved it before.

How RENY helps

We build and upgrade AEM Sites and Edge Delivery Services platforms, from archetype and Dispatcher standards to Core Components and deployment tooling. Talk to an AEM architect.