How to Navigate AEM

Your level of access and what options are available are determined by your Author Rights.  If you have any questions as to what or how to access certain options, please contact your AEM administrator, typically, your agency Webmaster.

You will find a chicklet on your Okta Dashboard for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).  Log in using your Illinois.gov ID.  You may also need to connect via a secure server and/or agency VPN.  Contact your AEM administrator with any issues.

Log into AEM author and access the desktop UI.

After logging in successfully, you will be greeted by the Navigation screen.  There are 3 main choices to select from:

• Sites - This is where the actual pages of your website are stored.  The editing of the webpage occurs here.  
• Assets - Documents, Images, Videos, Content Fragments, etc are stored here.
• Forms - AEM Adaptive Forms are created here for use on your website.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will utilize "Sites" unless otherwise specified.

After logging in and navigating through "Sites" you will see the site interface structure.  Depending on how your administrator has set the defaults, the layout will be in either a Column, Card, or List View.

You can change the page organization layout style to suit your own preference in navigating through Create button in the upper right corner and selecting the desired view as shown below.  

The column view displays the hierarchy of pages, with the parent folder/page on the left and lower level pages expanded to the right.  This is similar to a rough 'sitemap' of your website.  If your site uses manual navigation, this will not be as useful.

The card view is especially useful when using AEM on touch-friendly devices such as iPads and mobile devices. However, it can be challenging to view the page hierarchy in this mode.

The list view resembles the details view found in Windows Explorer. It is a helpful feature when you want to view the publishing date, status, and other details for multiple pages. However, it does not display the page hierarchy. 

The advantage of this view is the pages within the path can be re-ordered, which is necessary for reordering how pages are displayed in the Side Navigation component on Left Navigation template pages.

There is a difference in the way users may select a page or asset item, which are known as "hard" selects and "soft" selects.

Soft selects are done by simply clicking on an item's Title area, where the displayed Title and internal name are displayed. Soft selects will expand parent pages and folders to display children in the next column. These selected items are noted with a light-blue background. Soft-selected items will display the Page Details panel to the right if no child items exist.

Hard selects are done by by clicking on the page template icon to the left of the Title area, rather than the Title area itself. This results in the selected item filling with blue and notating selection with a "checkmark" overlayed inside. Hard-selected items will display the Page Details panel to the right and the Sites UI Toolbar.

The Site UI Toolbar displays when hard-selecting a page. There are a number of commands and options available once a page is selected. 

See below for a better understanding of some of the more common toolbar actions:

**DO NOT USE THIS FUNCTION**

This locks the page so that only you or an administrator can edit or publish the page. This is useful for working on a page in an office where multiple people might be working on the office’s pages at once.

Important Note: Be sure to unlock your page as soon as you are done with your work. No other users, including administrators, can unlock a page that you have locked.

Page Versioning and methods for their creation are covered in-depth under Creating and Reverting to a Previous Page Version.

Creating, Editing & Publishing Pages is covered in-depth under Page Actions.

Moving and internally renaming pages are discussed more in-depth under Moving and/or Renaming a Page.

Page Properties and how to access item metadata and properties are discussed more in-depth under Page Properties.