As some of you may be aware, AEM 6.1 has been made available. Click this link for the AEM 6.1 Release Notes, but here’s a quick rundown of some of the nice additions in this release:

• Improved Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection
• Cold standby topology
• Improved query and indexing management
• Sightly improvements (check out Feike Visser’s blog post for more details)
• Transient workflows
• Improved TouchUI interface
• Improved tool extensions for Eclipse and Brackets

There have also been updates made with integrations with other Adobe Marketing Cloud technologies such as Analytics, Target and Campaign, as well as updates to the MSM, Commerce, and Screen Add-Ons, and also to AEM Apps and AEM Forms.

One of my favourites updates though has to be the Responsive Layout functionality of AEM Sites. This allows the content author to not only change the layout of components on a page while snapping to a responsive grid, it also allows the author to give the same component different layouts depending on the device of the end user. With the use of smartphones and devices taking over desktop browsing, this is a real advantage to the business who can now update specific device layouts without needing to go through a development cycle for CSS updates.