Bloomreach Experience Manager V16.3 Release Notes

Highlights for v16.3

We are pleased to announce a new version of Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM). This minor release introduces a number of new features, useful technical stack upgrades and improvements to the product. In this document we will give a brief overview of the highlights in this release. You can also find these release notes at: https://xmdocumentation.bloomreach.com/about/release-notes/release-notes-overview.html

Everything mentioned in this document is an integral part of Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM), unless mentioned otherwise.

Significant Updates

Discover the Power of Bulk Workflows with Advanced Link Management

Phase 2 of the new advanced link management feature in Bloomreach Experience Manager (BrXM) is released. This feature enhances the visibility and management of references to documents, images, and assets across components, pages, and projects. It aims to support editors and authors in their daily tasks by providing better tracking. As of v16.3, the feature also supports concurrent publication for direct references of a document to provide more capabilities for workflow management for references.

What does this feature do?

The advanced link management feature allows users to:

Track and manage where specific documents, images, or assets are used across the platform. [available since v16.2]
Identify the impact of changes made to a document or asset on related pages or components.[available since v16.2]
Support concurrent publication workflows for direct references, reducing manual efforts and potential human errors.[available since v16.3]

Benefits

The benefits of the advanced link management feature include:

Improved visibility for documents and assets referenced in components, documents, and pages, facilitating easy tracking and management.
Streamlined concurrent publication workflows for referenced documents, eliminating manual efforts and human mistakes.
Increased efficiency and accuracy in content management processes, benefiting both editors and authors.
Reduced time spent on manually managing references, significantly improving the user experience.

You can find more information about this feature in our documentation.[1]

Streamlined Content Request Management

We've significantly improved the Advanced Search functionality and the handling of pending requests, making content management more efficient:

Refined Pending Requests Page: The Pending Requests panel has been improved:
- A "See all" button has been added to redirect users to the Advanced Search page. This allows users to view all documents with pending requests in one place.
- When accessed via the "See all" button, the Document Search page will automatically fetch documents with pending requests, enabling users to publish or take offline all relevant documents directly from the search interface.

Enhanced Document Search Page: The Document Search page in the Advanced Search addon has been enriched with:
- A new column indicating whether a document has a pending request (displaying "Yes" or "No").
- A new status filter for pending requests, allowing users to easily filter documents based on their pending request status.
Bulk Request Processing from Advanced Search: Users can now perform bulk accept or reject actions for pending requests directly from the Search Page. This streamlines workflow management, allowing for quicker processing of multiple requests at once.

These enhancements collectively simplify and expedite the management of pending requests, reducing the manual effort required and improving overall efficiency.

You can find more information about advanced search functionality in our documentation.[2]

Automated Translation Link Adaptation

While copying a document to translate, links will be automatically switched to the target locale if a copy of the link is available in the translated language. This saves time for editors and authors by removing the need for manually changing the links and ensures that translated documents have links appropriate for their locale, preventing broken or incorrect links. This feature ensures a seamless translation process, maintaining link integrity across different language versions of content.

Serve WebP Image Format for Better Website Performance

brXM 16.3 now supports storing and serving WebP images. WebP offers improved image compression and can enhance website performance.
While WebP is now a default allowed extension, scaling and cropping for WebP imagesets are not supported out-of-the-box. This limitation is due to the lack of a stable, native-free Java library for WebP manipulation. To enable scaling and cropping, you can either add a Java library like webp-imageio or implement a custom gallery processor, overriding `ScalingGalleryProcessor#handleMissingProcessor`. For more details, refer to the documentation. [3]

Ongoing Enhancements and Fixes

For end users

We fixed the issue where switching between the channel manager (experience manager) and content perspective via NavApp caused the CMS to stop responding.
The language translation dropdown now correctly checks the target folder's user rights before allowing translation creation.
A bug caused the Visual Editor to sometimes fail to display editable fields for documents, particularly when optional compound fields were used. The fix ensures that all fields, including those in optional compounds, are correctly displayed and editable in the Visual Editor.
We fixed the issue where custom link processors and index sitemap items in configuration resulted in non-selectable menu items while actually selected.

For developers

We updated the `org.apache.commons:commons-imaging` dependency from version 1.0-alpha2 to 1.0.0-alpha5. This improves stability and security by using a more recent version of the library, and ensures compatibility with other updates.
Replication can now be disabled on application start-up. This prevents accidental data replication to incorrect environments during database restoration, ensuring data integrity and security.
We fixed an issue where adding data through `setModel()` for linked documents (beans) was lost in Resource API v1.0, but only when the bean was picked (dragged/dropped) in Channel Manager.
Previously, if the Relevance Engagement plugin was not yet configured, starting the CMS would throw a long error stack trace. This has been changed to a warning, similar to other plugin warnings, to avoid unnecessary error clutter and make startup logs cleaner.

Bloomreach SPA SDK Updates

In v24.0.1 (4) of the SPA SDK, we've addressed the following issues:

Addressed critical security vulnerabilities, including the resolution of the "Vulnerable hardcoded 'cookie' package version" issue (Issue #43)
Resolved an exception that occurred while creating a page-specific component variant, which prevented the dialog from loading.

Bloomreach Cloud Updates

Enhanced Observability with Sysdig Integration

We are introducing a new feature that enhances observability by exposing Bloomreach Cloud metrics to third-party monitoring tools. Specifically, we have built a Sysdig API integration that allows you to pull Sysdig metrics directly into your monitoring environment for unified monitoring and visualization. We internally use Sysdig to monitor metrics of all stacks on Bloomreach Cloud. This integration leverages the Sysdig Prometheus API, enabling you to gain deeper insights into the performance and health of your Bloomreach Cloud deployments by accessing and visualizing metrics within your preferred monitoring tools. To utilize this, you will need to configure your monitoring tool with the Sysdig API token, which the Bloomreach Cloud team will provide.

Benefits:
- Unified Monitoring: Consolidate Bloomreach Cloud metrics into your existing monitoring dashboards for a holistic view of your system's health.
- Improved Insights: Gain better visibility into performance trends, resource utilization, and potential issues through detailed metric analysis.
- Streamlined Workflow: Simplify troubleshooting and performance optimization by having all relevant metrics in one place.
- Prometheus Compatibility: Seamlessly integrate with any monitoring tool that supports Prometheus data sources.
How to Get Started: The solution can be used with monitoring tools that support Prometheus data sources. If you are interested in this feature, please contact the Bloomreach Support team via https://support.bloomreach.com/. The Bloomreach Cloud team will provide you with the necessary Sysdig API token and configuration instructions.

Get help from BrXM Experts for Upgrade

The Bloomreach Professional Services team possesses extensive expertise in BrXM and has successfully executed various project implementations. Our team can facilitate a seamless upgrade of your project to the latest BrXM versions.

Additionally, we offer an Upgrade Assessment service for your projects. In just 3 days, our comprehensive evaluation will provide you with invaluable insights into your investment requirements. Our team of experts meticulously assesses your existing systems and infrastructure to determine the necessary investment for the upgrade.

The resulting detailed report encompasses the following components:

Executive summary
Overview of major changes
Recommended upgrade procedure
A comprehensive list of findings

It's important to note that the evaluation fee* is fully refundable should you decide to proceed with our Professional Services for the actual upgrade. This ensures that you not only receive top-notch guidance but also keeps your best interests in mind.

If you're interested in availing the assistance of our Professional Services team for your upgrade, please get in touch with your account manager. We're here to support your project's success every step of the way.

Notices

Update on Usage Statistics

Please be aware that we are replacing our vendor for the usage statistics module. As a result, you may encounter errors in the network tab of your browser. This module with the new integration is available in versions v16.3. 15.7.2 and 14.7.24. To avoid these errors, you can upgrade to one of these versions or consider completely disabling the collection of statistics. For more information on usage statistics, please refer to the documentation[5].

Minor release

v16.3 is a minor release, so it is backward compatible with the previous minor release. Also, updating to this version from the previous minor version should be of little effort. Specific upgrade instructions for this release can be found in our documentation[6] for enterprise customers (requires a login). An overview of all upgrade instructions for minor versions in this major release can also be found in our documentation [7].

Supported Technologies

The full system requirements can be found in the online system requirements [8]. This page also includes a detailed table of maintained third-party compatibility.

End-of-life, support and maintained code

Nomenclature refresher

As the terms ‘end-of-life’, ‘supported’, ‘maintained’ are used in various ways in our industry, we clarify the nomenclature we use for this below.

Supported product version

When a product is supported, this means that the customer will receive help from the helpdesk when issues arise as described in the service level agreement (SLA) that the customer has with Bloomreach. There are several service levels available.

Please note that if a bug is acknowledged in a supported, but not-maintained version, and a fix is needed, this fix will only be applied in the maintained product versions. This means the customer will need to move to a maintained version to receive the fix.

Maintained product version

When a product is maintained, the product code is updated and security- and bug fixes are made to the code. For maintained products, the system requirements for third party libraries and components are kept updated as well. Please note that we do not provide support for system requirement providers (e.g. databases, java, etc..), but we only support the usage for mentioned certified system requirement providers.

If a product is non-maintained, this means that the code is not maintained anymore and therefore might contain bugs and/or security vulnerabilities due to newly discovered issues in our code, or the libraries used.

End-of-life product version

Products that are not maintained and not supported are end-of-life. These might be available from our archives but could be removed without notice.

What does this mean for the current release?

Please note that this release changes existing maintenance or support modes. In the table below you can find the support status of your product and when support will end; this is dependent on the version currently being used and license level. Please note that versions that are not listed are not active and not supported, and therefore end-of-life.

Version	Planned end date of Standard Support	Planned end date of Premium Plus Support	Original major version release date
12.6	No Support	No support	July 2017
13.4	No Support	No support	January 2019
14.7	December 2024	December 2025	December 2019
15.7	December 2025	December 2026	April 2022
16.3	December 2026	December 2027	June 2024

Figure: reference table of planned end of support dates based on current SLA terms. Supported versions may differ depending on contractual agreements.

The versions highlighted in orange are actively maintained and provided with bug fixes and product improvements.

Security notes

This release includes updates for third-party dependencies that have published vulnerabilities. We recommend that customers keep their systems up to date with announced product releases.

Availability

This version of brXM is available as of April 14, 2025 onwards, the release of the open source will be made available after approximately 2 years due to our release policy.