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What is the roadmap for AEM after AEM 6.5

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I have heard that AEM 6.5 is the last on-premise version of AEM. Future versions will be cloud based only. I haven't found anything on the Adobe site about this. Would any one be able to provide some info or links? Thanks.

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Correct answer by
Level 2

(previous replies to this question were removed, as they did not represent the roadmap as of April 2020)

Adobe has decided not to use the major version vehicle in 2020 to ship a new AEM version. Instead we can ship the new features, improvements as part of Service Packs on top of AEM 6.5. The main reason is that we want customers to adopt features quicker, and the best way to do that, is to avoid a major release that is harder to update, and instead shipping it as incremental Service Packs, that get much quicker adoption. We understand that this might confuse, as it breaks the release schedule that we had for years.

A question I get a lot is: How are you folks able to ship these features via Service Pack and don't need a major release? Over the years we have made improvements to the Service Pack installer, that allows us to update nearly all parts of AEM during the installation. Further, based on the same AEM code-base - AEM as a Cloud Service - is getting daily updates. So we are developing changes in the product incremental and with full backwards compatibility in mind. 

So what you will see for AEM 6.5 is a continued steam of Service Packs every quarter (4x per year).

The next question that I get is: What about the EOL dates? Correct - they will need to change. We will update the EOL page soon https://helpx.adobe.com/support/programs/eol-matrix.html#AB to represent AEM 6.5 with that change in release strategy. 

Hope this helps to understand the roadmap.

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Correct answer by
Level 2

(previous replies to this question were removed, as they did not represent the roadmap as of April 2020)

Adobe has decided not to use the major version vehicle in 2020 to ship a new AEM version. Instead we can ship the new features, improvements as part of Service Packs on top of AEM 6.5. The main reason is that we want customers to adopt features quicker, and the best way to do that, is to avoid a major release that is harder to update, and instead shipping it as incremental Service Packs, that get much quicker adoption. We understand that this might confuse, as it breaks the release schedule that we had for years.

A question I get a lot is: How are you folks able to ship these features via Service Pack and don't need a major release? Over the years we have made improvements to the Service Pack installer, that allows us to update nearly all parts of AEM during the installation. Further, based on the same AEM code-base - AEM as a Cloud Service - is getting daily updates. So we are developing changes in the product incremental and with full backwards compatibility in mind. 

So what you will see for AEM 6.5 is a continued steam of Service Packs every quarter (4x per year).

The next question that I get is: What about the EOL dates? Correct - they will need to change. We will update the EOL page soon https://helpx.adobe.com/support/programs/eol-matrix.html#AB to represent AEM 6.5 with that change in release strategy. 

Hope this helps to understand the roadmap.