The clock is officially ticking on the Classic UI. Its days are numbered.
During the AEM 6.3 beta sessions Cedric Huesler, Director Product Management for Digital Experience Mgmt at Adobe, told everyone that when AEM 6.3 officially launched that they would be announcing when the Classic UI would be sunsetted. As you might imagine, that got the attention of a lot of people. Adobe has been telling us for a few years that they want to dump the Classic UI. And it makes sense. They have been slowly migrating all of their other Adobe Experience Cloud Solutions to this new user interface. Having everything on the same interface makes it easy to make the argument of how seamlessly the products work together.
So, when is it happening?
The plan is to deprecate it by 2018, and then to have it completely removed by 2019. Specifically from their AEM 6.3 release page: “Adobe is planning to deprecate the Classic UI with the AEM release planned for April 2018. The 2018 release of AEM will still contain the Classic UI as it is part of AEM 6.2/6.3 releases. Following that, Adobe is planning to remove the Classic UI from the AEM release in April 2019.” Keep in mind that this is just the plan, and things could change down the line. However, it is probably a good idea for you to get comfortable with the Classic UI being gone in a couple years.
Cedric reiterated all of this in his keynote presentation for Immerse 2017. He also went on to elaborate about the terminology. Touch UI will just be called the UI, or User Interface. They are dropping the word “Touch”. Adobe has also been referring to it as the “unified Experience Cloud UI”, since that is what they are using for all of their Solutions and Cloud offerings. Time will tell if that name will stick or not. For now, it would be best to start getting used to that new name.
Recommendation
If you aren’t already using the Touch UI, or if you are not familiar with it, and you plan on continuing to use AEM or develop on AEM then get used to it. Support for the Classic UI isn’t going away just yet. Adobe stated on their UI Best Practices page: “Customers running AEM 6.3 will benefit from full production support using the classic user interface.” Nonetheless it won’t last forever. Come next release, Adobe is no longer going to be supporting issues related to the Classic UI. So if something comes up, you will be on your own.
While I personally prefer the Classic UI (only because that is what I “cut my teeth” on with AEM), it is time to embrace the way that Adobe is taking their interface. I even did a video about it.