Bloomreach Experience Manager V16.5 Release Notes

Known issue
In versions 16.5.0 and 16.5.1, accessing the Experience Manager without the /cms context path (for example, http://cms.example.com instead of http://cms.example.com/cms/) can cause static assets (JS, CSS, fonts) to fail to load and return HTTP 500 when using an Apache reverse proxy as documented.
Please upgrade to v16.5.2, which includes the fix for the issue.
If you have any questions, please reach out to Bloomreach Support.

Highlights for v16.5

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

Modernized Frontend and Boosted Performance with Angular

With version 16.5, we have completed the migration from AngularJS to Angular in Experience Manager App. This essential upgrade was driven by AngularJS reaching its end of life, which presented security and maintenance challenges. This migration provides a more secure, maintainable, and high-performing application with a less complex codebase. For our users, this translates to faster load and render times and a more responsive, smoother user interface.

Boost Your Efficiency with CMS Performance Upgrades

With version 16.4.2 and 16.5 we introduced significant performance improvements to the CMS UI:

Faster Content Navigation: Navigating the folder tree in the Content perspective is now a much smoother and more responsive experience. By intelligently storing information about a folder's contents directly on the folder itself (hippostd:hasfolders property), we have achieved an approximately 3x performance improvement for the tree's expand/collapse actions. This solution avoids unnecessary iterations through child nodes, allowing you to browse through your content repositories with greater speed. Please see “Use the Folder Tree Performance Improvement” [1] for more information.
Quicker Document Overview Loading: The document overview panel in the content perspective now loads significantly faster, particularly for documents rich with components. We have optimized the panel to load only essential information upfront, preventing delays by no longer retrieving all underlying component and sub-node data. This ensures you can access document details quickly and efficiently without interruption
Optimized Sitemap Generation for Experience Pages: We have improved the performance of sitemap tree generation, especially for environments with a large number of Experience Pages. To enhance system stability and responsiveness, the process now uses a dedicated, impersonated system session to build the sitemap, which speeds up generation and avoids bottlenecks.

Expanded AI Capabilities with New Models and Image Support

Building on the foundation of the BrXM AI Content Assistant, this release significantly expands its capabilities, giving you more powerful and flexible tools for your content workflows

New Model Integrations: The assistant now integrates with Google's Vertex AI Gemini and Ollama. Configuration for both of these model providers is supported directly within Essentials.
Image Support: The AI assistant can now also support images as a primary context. When viewing or editing an image within the CMS, you can leverage the assistant to analyze it or perform other related tasks directly.

Please note that image support is available since v16.4.1.

Find more information in AI Content Assistant developer guide[2].

Checker Repository Maintenance Tool Enhancements

This release streamlines the management of Lucene indexes with architectural improvements enhancing maintainability and with new capabilities for developers and system administrators.

Checker Tool Enhancement: The Checker tool now includes a new feature to export Lucene indexes from your repository. This functionality is particularly useful for:

Creating backups of repository indexes
Facilitating index recreation from scratch
Supporting repository maintenance tasks

For detailed usage instructions, please see the Repository Checker Tool documentation [3]

CMS Architecture Improvements: As part of this enhancement, we've made architectural improvements to the CMS codebase by relocating `ExternalRepositorySyncRevisionService` from `org.onehippo.repository.journal` to `org.apache.jackrabbit.core.query.lucene.export`
This change consolidates index-related functionality within the Jackrabbit core, improving code organization and maintainability.

Ongoing Enhancements and Fixes

For end users

We have clarified the terminology in the revision history ribbon, as the terms 'branch' and 'Core' were unclear to editors, especially in non-English locales.
We fixed an issue where using option groups in dynamic dropdowns (selections plugin) would cause an error.
We resolved a bug that caused a NullPointerException when users tried to use the “Publish” or “Show references” actions on certain documents.
The performance of the "See all" button for pending requests has been significantly improved by optimizing the underlying query, which previously caused high CPU usage and sometimes failed to show results.
To prevent accidental data loss, the deletion dialog for documents and pages now includes a clear warning stating that “in the CMS, it is not possible to revert deletions“.
We fixed an issue where the site reference locations for a document would appear empty in the References dialog if the document was used in an Experience page component that was not linked to a menu item.
A UI bug has been resolved where relevance variants created for one component would incorrectly appear in the variants dropdown for other components until the side panel was closed and reopened.
We fixed a display issue in the Experience Manager where the ‘Save’ button was not fully visible for some non-English languages.
An issue was addressed where some field properties used in previous versions were missing in the Experience View after upgrading.
To improve workflow efficiency, the publication/take-offline dialog will now close automatically if the operation is successful for both the opened document and any selected references. The dialog will remain open if any error occurs. This improvement is also available in v16.4.1.
A URL rewriter has been added to the "Location" field in Advanced Search to enhance its functionality.This improvement is also available in v16.4.1.

For developers

We addressed an SEO issue where search engines could incorrectly index internal Delivery API 1.0 references ($ref paths), particularly on sites using frameworks like Next.js with server-side rendering and rehydration. To give developers control over this situation, the prefix for these internal references is now configurable via a new query parameter, and a corresponding configuration option will be available in the Bloomreach SPA SDK v26.0.1 to ensure full compatibility.
We have enhanced security and flexibility in Essentials by removing the hardcoded admin user and password. You can now override the default credentials using the command line parameters: -Dessentials.user and -Dessentials.password.
A fix has been implemented to prevent the LDAP sync process from removing all users from the JCR if the connection to the LDAP server breaks mid-sync. The system will now automatically retry the operation up to 5 times at 30-second intervals to ensure the connection is stable before proceeding. If the connection remains unreliable after the retries, the operation will fail to ensure data integrity. This improvement is also available in v16.4.1.Please see LDAP Authentication [4] documentation for more information.
This release includes updates for several third-party libraries. For a detailed list, please refer to the detailed release documentation [5].

Bloomreach SPA SDK Updates

Support for Angular 20 and React 19 Support
The latest Bloomreach SPA SDK releases provide support for modern frontend frameworks, including Angular 20 and React 19. Key updates include the modernization of React components to functional components and improved StrictMode compatibility. Please note there is a new requirement for a single BrPage component per route.
Compatibility with Configurable Delivery API Delimiter
To support the new configurable Delivery API delimiter, the v26.0.1 SPA SDK has a corresponding configuration option to parse the custom delimiter.

For more information, please see the SPA SDK releases [6]

Professional Services Plugin Newsletter

The xm-s3-manager plugin [7] version 3.1.0 has been released. This update includes a significant upgrade of the AWS SDK from v1 to v2.

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

There are no notices.

Minor release

v16.5 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[8] 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 [9].

Supported Technologies

The full system requirements can be found in the online system requirements [10]. 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
16.5	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 September 24, 2025 onwards, the release of the open source will be made available after approximately 2 years due to our release policy.