Impersonate Users in AEM Author Environment

PublishedDecember 10, 2024

To troubleshoot issues, we may need to impersonate users in the author environment. With the Impersonate functionality, a user can work on behalf of another user.

Recently, we encountered an issue where user was unable to edit pages due to CSS not loading correctly. To investigate the issue, we attempted to impersonate the user to better understand the issue.

Impersonating user is straightforward with administrator permissions, but we face challenges without admin access. We will explore methods for impersonating user both with and without admin privileges.

With Admin privilege, navigate to Tools > Security > Users and select the user you want to impersonate. From Impersonators tab, add yourself as Impersonator.

Now, by accessing the User option in the header and select the user you've set yourself as the impersonator for.

You will now be able to complete tasks as if you were using the account and troubleshoot issues by understanding user's perspective.

To enable impersonation for non-admin users, we need to create a separate user group, such as "impersonators-group" and provide READ permissions to the /home/users node. Once a few team members are added to the impersonators-group, they able to impersonate other users, as impersonation requires READ permissions in the /home/users node.

Impersonate Users in AEM Author Environment

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