end user profile and its related nodes sync in publish farm

[varshsr]

Does AEM 6.1 sites OOTB offers end user profile and preferences (assuming his preferences are maintained with in his profile node as child nodes) sync up across publish instances  (publish farms)

or

Is this only available for user nodes only and that to only for AEM communities & not for AEM Sites -https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-1/administer/communities/sync.html

Please clarify ?

[Opkar_Gill · Accepted solution]

Hi,

communities makes use of Sling Content Distribution[1]. This is available for any application.

Regards,

Opkar

[1] https://github.com/apache/sling/blob/trunk/contrib/extensions/distribution/README.md

[varshsr]

Are there any pros & cons of using sling distribution for achieving immediate updates to user generated data ? or AEM should be kept out of user generated data and move such data into a single source repositories (MongoDB/DB) with transactional capabilities  

Also how is this mechanism different from reverse replication of user generated content - sling distribution vs reverse replication

[Opkar_Gill]

Sling Content Distribution(SCD) is not used for User Generated Content(UGC), the common store is the mechanism chosen by communities for UGC. The communities documentation explains the rationale for not storing UGC in AEM.

SCD still has a slight delay as content is distributed across multiple instances. The principle of the common store is to have a single location which instances write to, then it's a simple case of another instance "reading" the updates when the content/page is requested. So no content is stored/persisted in the AEM instance, it is read/written to the common store, no distribution is involved.

It is my understanding that Sling Content Distribution was the mechanism chosen by the communities team to address the issues that previous versions of AEM had with reverse replication for user synchronization. There is not really any use case for using reverse replication now. Reviewing the documentation for Sling Content Distribution should provide you with all the information you require on how it works and so differs from reverse replication.

Regards,

Opkar

[1] https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-1/administer/communities/srp/asrp.html

[2] https://github.com/apache/sling/blob/trunk/contrib/extensions/distribution/README.md

[varshsr]

Thanks Opkar,

Now I see sling distribution is an enhancement/addition over the reverse replication which allows author instance acts as master to sync all the publish farms in configuration without content getting updated/stored into Author ( earlier In case of reverse replication without sling distribution content was stored into author and then replicated to other publish farms)

Few interesting question ..

1) Why is common store restricted to user generated content like comments and not for user profiles which uses SCD

2) Why an end user profile & his preferences are not seen as a user generated content which needs to be a transactional & single view of record rather synced up across publish instance via sling distributions.?

3) Is there any plans for AEM to have separate repository for transactional content like user profiles , preferences & user generated etc ?

4) A possible reference solution will be AEM TarMk for content management + Separate workspace inside JCR repository or outside repository shared between all the publish instances and provided an user management and user generated content management over the this separate repository controlled from AEM author ?

[Opkar_Gill]

Hi,

all very interesting questions :)  and would require the product team to answer them. My answers would only be speculation.

Regards,

Opkar

[varshsr]

Thanks Opkar