Best of adaptTo() 2025

As every late September, it’s adaptTo() time! Europe’s leading AEM developer conference hosted by diva-e Conclusion.

Since 2011, what began as a small open-source meetup around Apache Sling, adaptTo() has grown into the go-to event for AEM engineers, developers, and architects. adaptTo() is unique: a single track means everyone shares the same conversations and learns from every talk, and roughly a quarter of attendees take the stage themselves. It’s the annual gathering of the AEM community. 100% technical content, zero sales or marketing talks, all focused squarely on solving your toughest AEM challenges.

This year, we had 27 talks presented by 48 speakers, a wide variety of talks covering all areas, from low-level Sling internals to hard-won lessons from large AEM as a Cloud Service programs or the newest Edge Delivery Services challenges. Additionally, we had round tables, expert sessions, and our beloved lightning talks.

My personal top 5 talks

There were so many outstanding talks that narrowing them down to five was tough. These picks aren’t ranked - they simply appear in the order they came to mind.

Solving Edge Delivery and AEM Performance in China: Comparing Approaches & Results

Performance in China is a huge thing! In all international projects, there is this question: Will my content perform in China? The answer is mostly NO, and there is never an easy solution to that. This talk cut through the myths with field data and hard trade-offs. Tad Reeves (Arbory Digital) and Kamil Chociej (StreamX) compared patterns for AEM Cloud Service and Edge Delivery Services (Document Authoring/Dark Alley) when your audience sits behind the Great Firewall and shared results from real customer rollouts. Big takeaways: many familiar observability and third-party services don’t work; you often need China-native equivalents (Alicloud/Tencent/Baidu). If you want sub-second response times, push HTML and media into mainland China during publication and treat cross-border links as liabilities. It was the most practical session I’ve seen on making EDS/AEM actually fast and compliant for users in China, no silver bullets, just a clear solution that saves months of trial and error.

Learnings from cloud migrations (that can help you avoid headaches)

Thomas Wolfart (diva-e Conclusion) delivered the session I wish I’d had before my first AEM 6.5 to AEM as a Cloud Service migration. He framed the talk around organizational patterns and four concrete challenges pulled from real projects. Exactly the kind of detail that helps you dodge roadblocks before they blow up your timeline. A few takeaways that resonated:

As someone who has collected their fair share of “why doesn’t this behave like 6.5?” headaches, this session felt like a checklist for pragmatic risk-reduction and stakeholder alignment.

Can’t we just automate this? Permissions & content updates as-a-code with ACM Tool

Most on-prem AEM setups ship with the famous “Groovy Console” installed. It’s been used a million times for tweaks and manipulating content. ACM (AEM Content Manager) is the upgrade we’ve been waiting for. Tomasz Sobczyk and Krystian Panek (VML) built it as open source. It’s a one-stop console. It automates the unglamorous but critical work: migrating thousands of pages, managing large permission hierarchies, and producing auditable reports. It runs across local AEM, the Cloud SDK, on-prem, AMS, and AEM as a Cloud Service. The editor feels like an IDE with Monaco, code completion, and auto-imports. Long jobs execute as Sling Jobs with health checks. That plays nicely with AEMaaCS timeouts and Cloud Manager pipelines. The goal is bold: replace Groovy Console, AC Tool, AECU, and APM with one scriptable, CI-friendly workflow. Net result: fewer ad-hoc prod scripts and more versioned, repeatable ops.

Trust, But Verify: Experimental innovations in AEM Assets Trust and Governance

As I’m always interested in new features that our customers will benefit from, I was super happy that Radu Cotescu (Adobe) previewed two long-awaited AEM Assets capabilities: native malware scanning for uploads and invisible watermarking for authenticity/provenance (built on TrustMark and aligned with C2PA). He showed how these plug into the Assets processing pipeline (quarantine/unquarantine, notifications, events) and even hinted at an early-next-year GA plenty of time to prep governance playbooks and CI checks for safer, trusted content ops. Also, an entertaining aside finally settled a long-running dinner debate: raclette is Swiss in origin, not French. Case closed!

Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service: A Deep Dive into the Future of Commerce

Refreshing to see an Adobe Commerce talk among all the AEM sessions. Irmi Hobmaier and Aslı Merdan (eggs unimedia) opened day three with a demo-heavy look at Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service (ACCS). They built an end-to-end shop and showed how it plugs into the AEM ecosystem. We saw the ACCS architecture and the new Storefront built on Edge Delivery Services with drop-ins and slots. They explained where Edge Delivery Services and App Builder fit. They contrasted classic CIF patterns with cloud-native integration. GenAI use cases for faster content creation came up, as did A/B testing in the flow. On the hands-on side, they used Document Authoring (da.live), AIO CLI, and Adobe Developer Console. They pulled external product data via GraphQL Mesh, with Postman examples. Finally, they wired Commerce events to App Builder runtime actions and showed why synchronous webhooks matter. A crisp, end-to-end view of how Commerce SaaS is maturing and how AEM teams can adopt it without reinventing their stack.

I need more…

Because we had sooo many great talks, I can’t bring just five! Here is an additional one - it is not one; there are practically five! Our great Lightning Talks!

The Lightning Talks are an unconference format where participants can on-site sign up for a 10-minute talk about whatever they like to! It’s always a lot of laughs, insights, and surprises.
This year’s lineup ranged from “Content is king… NO! KNOWLEDGE is king!” (Roman Müller, yours truly) to “Healthchecks in AEM CS” (Jörg Hoh, Adobe), “Sling OIDC Authentication handler” (Nicola Scendoni, Adobe), “Cross-Environment Replication in AEMaaCS” (Yegor Kozlov, FLEETCOR), and “Deprecation” (Stefan Seifert, diva-e Conclusion). Ten minutes, one idea, high energy - and often the spark for next year’s full-length sessions.

If you missed the adaptTo() conference or want to be part of it, all talks are available on our website, www.adapt.to. To make sure you're the first to know when early-bird tickets for adoptTo() 2026 go on sale, do what insiders do, and subscribe to our newsletter.