What is the advantages of CQ5/AEM over CQ4? Worth the upgrade?

Question

Who used Communique 4 CMS and now using CQ5/AEM, what is the most important improvements to mention? How hard /fast was the migration process, what was the complicated things about it, were you able migrate all the content? Any experiences are welcome.

Answer 1

Application stability, improved authoring experience, security fixes, performance, and feature set is going to be the biggest delta when you're comparing with a legacy version. Upgrading also means you can tap on a larger resource pool for CQ5 development (legacy resources are difficult to find and training new resources on a legacy platform takes time and decreases morale) If you have a healthy allocation on your resources for large efforts, I would suggest going with a hybrid route for upgrading where you simply migrate areas that have the easiest compatibility. Major steps that come into mind...

• Migrate content, users, and DAM.
• Rewrite or port reuseable code to current CQ version (5.6.1 @ time of writing)
• Run a large regression effort to assure functionality loss is kept at non-impactful levels. Some examples: application code base [APIs, beans, taglibs, component configs, dialogs, etc...], front end, architecture [author instances, publisher instances, and dispatchers], and CRX data consistency/retention).

I do not have experience in CQ prior to the Adobe acquisition but the minor releases that have been distributed (5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.6.1) are consistently substantial. Expect a large migration effort with the biggest pain points surrounding deprecated/removed APIs, component compatibility issues (especially custom components written in ExtJS), missing etc and app files, and overall performance of the application.