Let us start Adobe Experience Manager

Let us see how you install and start AEM. You first need to get an AEM installation file, which is fondly called as the QuickStart file. Adobe doesn’t provide you a trial version of the same. One of the ways to get an installation file is to attend the Adobe Training Services classroom session. Adobe distributes the installation file in the classroom training.

AEM installation file is a jar file. It will accompany with a license file – license.properties. The License file contains the license information that you need to run AEM. If you are using AEM in a production environment, that is for hosting your content in real-time, you need to pay the license fee and obtain the license.

AEM is licensed based on various modules it offers: Sites, Apps, Forms, Community, and Assets.

• Sites: Allows you to create websites.
• Apps: Allows you to create apps used for hand-held devices.
• Forms: Allows you to manage LiveCycle Forms.
• Assets: Allows you to manage digital assets, such as images, icons, pdfs, and so on.
• Community: Don’t ask me what it is used for.

The license file that you obtained for training purpose allows you to use all these functionalities.

Let us install AEM. Wait a second. You need to have Java 6, specifically JRE 6, installed in your machine. Obtain JRE from the Oracle website at free of cost.

• Copy the QuickStart jar file and license file to a folder named AEM.
• Rename the QuickStart jar file as follows: aem-author-4502 (I don’t remember the original name of the QuickStart file.)
• When you install AEM, it takes some key variables from the file name itself. In this case, the first string aem represents AEM itself. The next one, the author, represents that it’s an author instance. (I hope I am not adding a lot of jargon.) It means that you use it for authoring your content. This instance mostly used by people in your organization to add, edit, and delete content. People outside your organization doesn’t take care of these tasks. They simply view the content. The third part of 4502 indicates that AEM will run on that port number. That means if some other process is already using that port, AEM quits. (Drobo uses that port by default.)
• Double-click the file you created. It will bring up a pop-up window as shown below.

Soon, it will change as follows. AEM is started. (Now, don’t ask me how to stop AEM.)
Don’t close this window. If you happen to close this window, you need to kill AEM from the Task Manager to stop it. Once AEM is up, your default browser opens up and shows you the login screen. Log in using admin as user name and admin as password. You will see the Project management page after a successful login.



We will explore various pages in a short while – after we have a quick look at the folder where you copied the QuickStart file.