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 columns can be sorted.

There are a number of commands and options available, once a page is selected.  Some options, such as Edit, Properties and Publishing are covered elsewhere.

To see these options, you will need to hard select the page (click on the icon rather than the title area).

Closer look at top tool bar

There are a number of options available, but here are some of the more common options available and unique to this environment:

Versioning creates a “snapshot” of a page at a specific point in time. With versioning, you can perform the following actions:

• Create a version of a page.
• Restore a page to a previous version in order to undo a change that you made to a page, for example.
• Compare the current version of a page with a previous version with differences in the text and images highlighted.

After selecting "Timeline" (above), here are the general steps to create and save a page version:

1.  After selecting Timeline, click on the up-arrow near the bottom of the screen.

2. Give the version a Label and/or Description.  Both are optional, but are recommended.  Then click on "Create"

3. After "Create" you will see the versioned saved.

4. You will then be able to Preview, Compare and Revert back to this future.

**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.

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