Introduction to AEM Screens

The following User Guides have been created for AEM Enterprise clients who are looking at launching AEM Screens within their Physical Locations (e.g. Retail Stores). They intend to take a User from the beginning (e.g. setting up a Location & Display), all the way through to launching Localised & Personalised Campaigns.

To get started, you need to ensure that 'Screens' has been activated within your AEM Environment. We recommend (as a minimum) that you are running AEM 6.5 or above. Please contact your Adobe account manager to ensure AEM Screens has been activated.

A. High Level Overview

AEM Screens can be divided into the following key functional areas:

1. Locations / Stores
2. Displays / Devices
3. Assets (Videos & Images)
4. Channels
5. Schedules

We cover each of the above Functional Areas in more detail below. We also provide links to the respective User Guides for each of these Areas (clicking on these will open the User Guide in a New Tab).

Before you can access these, you will first need to set up an AEM Screens Project (see Setting Up Your First AEM Screens Project)

1. Locations / Stores

In this section, you define the Locations Folder structure that you would like to use for all your Stores/Locations. We recommend arranging Locations by State. You can then define each of your respective Stores within these Locations Folders.

User Guide: Create a New Store / Location

2. Displays / Devices

In this section, you manage Device/Player Registration to specific Displays/Display-Types in your respective Locations/Stores.

At a high level, you will point an AEM Screens Player to the AEM Author Instance, Register the Player, Assign it to a Location > Display & finally Activate the Player (move the Player from the Author to the Publish instance). In a commercial AEM Screens deployment, all Devices/Players will be connected to the Publish instance of AEM.

User Guide: Create a New Display / Display-Type

3. Assets (Videos & Images)

In this section, you upload any of the Assets (Images or Videos) that you want to run on your Displays.

Please Note: Assets is not accessed from within the Screens section, Assets can be accessed from the AEM Main Menu. This allows your organisation to use the same Assets across different Touch Points (e.g. Sites, Apps & Screens).

User Guide: Uploading Assets/Campaigns (Videos & Images)

4. Channels

In this section, you manage each of the Channels that will be assigned to your respective Displays/Display-Types.

A Channel contains a series of Campaigns (Videos or Images) that will Play On-Rotation on any Display that the channel is assigned to.

We strongly recommend using the Display-Type within the Channel's Name to ensure that Authors are clear on which Channels to make updates .

User Guide: Create a New Channel

User Guide: Assigning the Channel to a Display

5. Schedules

In this section, you manage the Schedules that will be assigned to your Displays.

Once you launch Screens across a large number of Displays, you want to ensure that you are managing Channel Assignment to a Display through a Schedule. A Schedule works in exactly the same way as assigning a channel to a single Display, however it allows you to manage the Channel Assignment from a Central/Single Location. When you update the Channels Priority within the Schedule, the Priority is updated across all Displays that have that Schedule assigned to them.

User Guide: Creating a Shared Schedule for Displays

B. Author & Publish Instance

An important point to always remember. Devices/Displays are connected to your AEM Publish instance. They are NOT Connected to AEM Author Instance. Any change that you make in Author, will therefore only become effective once you have Published the Change.

If you add a New Location or a New Display to AEM Author and you don't publish them they do not exist in AEM Publish. If you then try to Assign a Device to the Location/Display you can not assign it because the Location/Display does not yet exist in Publish.

This should always be your first step when troubleshooting issues. Tick/Select the Item and make sure  it has been Published.