Live Authoring Collaboration for AEM Sites

This project is an extension for the Adobe Experience Manager Sites platform. It enhances the AEM Author user interface to support live collaboration for editors within content pages, providing both protection during concurrent editing as well as additional features for live interaction. The extension won the final of the 2021 edition of the Adobe AEM Rockstar community contest.

Features

Always current page content
- Immediate display of content updates
- Supports Add / Update / Remove / Move operations
- Supports Style System updates
- Supports Responsive Layout updates
Component leasing
- Automated lease and release of components during editing
- Lease owner indicator
- Protection from concurrency overwrites
- Support for full-page dialogs (i.e. mobile)
Listing of current page editors
- Always current in-page listing of active editors
- Sites console preview of active editors
Live editor feedback
- Immediate annotation and sketch updates
- On-page notification for new annotations

Although these features are available for use in the current release, it should be noted that this is an early version which should be considered a technology demo rather than production ready software.

Supported platforms

AEM as a Cloud Service
AEM 6.5.8+ (On Premise / Managed Service / Cloud Manager)
Compatible with current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari

How to install

Embedded installation with Maven

The package is available as a Maven artifact and can get added to an existing AEM project. This is the simplest setup and the only approach when using AEM as a Cloud Service.

Integration works with current Maven archetypes for AEM (packaging in all module) as well as older Maven archetypes for AEM (packaging in ui.apps module). The below instructions assume the current Maven archetype.

First add the Maven repository into your project pom.xml:

<repositories>
    [...]
    <repository>
        <id>wmd-repo</id>
        <url>http://repo.wmd-software.com/repository/maven-releases/</url>
        <releases>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
        </releases>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Then add the package dependency and version in the same file. If you later want to upgrade the integrated extension, all you need to update is this property:

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        [...]
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.mwmd</groupId>
            <artifactId>aem-author-collab.all</artifactId>
            <version>0.1.0</version>
            <type>zip</type>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

Now reference this dependency in the project.all pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.mwmd</groupId>
    <artifactId>aem-author-collab.all</artifactId>
    <type>zip</type>
</dependency>

And finally embed the extension in your main application package in the same file:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.jackrabbit</groupId>
    <artifactId>filevault-package-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <extensions>true</extensions>
    [...]
    <configuration>
        [...]
        <embeddeds>
            [...]
            <embedded>
                <groupId>com.mwmd</groupId>
                <artifactId>aem-author-collab.all</artifactId>
                <type>zip</type>
                <target>/apps/yourproject-vendor-packages/container/install.author</target>
            </embedded>
        </embeddeds>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

That's it, you can now build your application as usual. The package gets embedded into yours and will be installed automatically with yours.

Setup with Dispatcher

If you use AEM as a Cloud Service, this step doesn't apply

In case your AEM Author is using Dispatcher, you need to bypass the Dispatcher module for the Server-Sent Event requests. Dispatcher doesn't support the long-running HTTP responses used by Server-Sent Events.

For Apache2, simply add the below in your configuration, e.g. in the section (mod_proxy must be enabled):

# Specify the hostname and port of your AEM Author, e.g. localhost:4502
ProxyPass "/bin/aem-author-collab/sse" "http://localhost:4502/bin/aem-author-collab/sse"

Standalone build and installation

If you instead prefer to check out the source from GitHub and build it yourself for manual installation of the package, first check out the code and build it on the root folder aem-author-collab with

mvn clean install

After the successful build, you can find the package here:

./aem-author-collab/all/target/aem-author-collab.all-<VERSION>.zip

You can then install this zip file manually in your AEM Author instance in Package Manager.

Configuration

All following configuration is optional, the package can get installed and most features used without any configuration. These OSGi configuration can be made manually in the Web Console or deployed as OSGi configuration nodes to the repository.

CSRF Filter exclusion for Beacon URL

For immediate detection of editors leaving the page, a Beacon request is used. Because this Beacon request uses HTTP POST but doesn't carry a CSRF Token, the AEM CSRF Filter blocks it. Without the below configuration, it will take longer (~1.5 min) to detect that the editor has left the page. This is an out of the box service and the value should be added to the existing configuration.

Configuration PID: com.adobe.granite.csrf.impl.CSRFFilter

Property	Type	Value
`filter.excluded.paths`	string (multi)	`/bin/aem-author-collab/beacon`

Extension Features

With the below settings the behavior of the extension can get adjusted.

Configuration PID: com.mwmd.core.services.impl.CollabSettingsImpl

Setting	Property	Type	Default value
Show profile pictures	`profile.pictures`	boolean	`true`

Included configurations

The following configurations are automatically setup when installing the extension. They are listed here for information only.

Configuration PID	Purpose
`org.apache.sling.jcr.repoinit.RepositoryInitializer~aem-author-collab`	Creates a service user `aem-author-collab-service` with read permissions for`/content` and `/home/users`
`org.apache.sling.serviceusermapping.impl.ServiceUserMapperImpl.amended~aem-author-collab`	Makes the service user `aem-author-collab-service` available to the extension

mwmd/aem-author-collab