Why Adobe Experience Manager is in High Demand — and How Assemble is Prepared to Deliver.
We all want to provide the best possible experience for our customers. But that means something totally different for everyone. So you’re expected to deliver highly personalized and relevant content in all the right places. But that requires a lot of work — and some seriously robust digital solutions.
Hey, no one knows this better than us. And that’s exactly why we decided to make it a priority to become experts in the one tool that brings together all the programs you use and love into one, making the process a lot simpler and more secure.
You guessed it (or you read the title of this blog): Assemble is becoming an Adobe Experience Manager partner. Here’s what that means for you.
What is Adobe Experience Manager?
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise content management system (CMS) that optimizes all aspects of website creation and management. You can easily set up a website, build templates and pages based on those templates, create reusable components, and organize/edit all media assets — all on a simple UI that you create and can update whenever.
Basically, Adobe said ‘hey, since we’re already providing a ton of top-of-the-line software and have so many strong alliances with other companies, why not create our own environment with all the services a web client could ever possibly need?’ An expansion into web production just made sense.
“When you’re developing a website, you may have WordPress as the CMS, Google for Analytics, MailChimp for email marketing, etc.” Fabian Miranda, Studio Manager | Web Dev & Production, explained. “But what if you could get access to all these services in a single, reliable provider. That’s AEM. It’s a very robust and powerful CMS that allows clients to quickly update and create content through very easy-to-use interfaces — without having coding skills. Developers can simply enable an admin layer where editors can hop in and easily make changes. They have access to tons of customizable templates and out-of-the-box components, and the ability to integrate all the other tools you may use.”
Why We’re All About It — And Everyone Else Is Too
Think of AEM as a Web Development, Marketing, Cloud, eCommerce, Testing and Optimization, and Analytics solution all in one. And as part of Adobe’s bigger suite of services known as Adobe Experience Cloud, every software within this cloud is easy to integrate with outside programs, which means that companies can centralize all of their needs within a single ecosystem
So how is it different from WordPress or Drupal? Well, being an enterprise-level CMS, the level of security is already far beyond that of a regular CMS. Adobe not only supports all the standard authentication modern protocols, but they also release security updates all the time.
“The infrastructure of their cloud offers scalability and solidness,” Fabian added. “It offers a lot more privacy and protection of sensitive data, and depending on a business’ specific need, it’s flexible enough to act as a headless CMS. So AEM can either handle the Frontend rendering, or it can decouple itself from this functionality and delegate it to a framework/library like React or Angular. And by utilizing JSON API, it offers a simple way to share data to external apps.”
But Why Now?
While AEM isn’t exactly new (est. Oct. 2012), it has gotten even better in the last couple of years. So if you’re not sold yet by the benefits of record launch speeds, elevated security, and convenience, the system’s more recent launch of their own Artificial Intelligence, Adobe Sensei, just might tip the scale.
“This new integration allows the platform to learn and adapt depending on how authors use its features,” Fabian shared. “So it can make suggestions when it comes to content creation, asset categorization, and website optimization. Let’s say you’re uploading an asset that’s an image of a man working in an office. Sensei will make recommendations of various smart text to apply to the image based on what it sees — tags like ‘office,’ ‘work,’ ‘desk,’ ‘man,’ etc. Even further, it will learn from your decisions and based on the tags you choose, and adjust those suggestions in the future.”
Adobe has also really put a well-planned marketing strategy in place to get the word out. As undisputed leaders in the creative/dev software sector with alliances to all the top organizations dedicated to advertising, design, and web development, they have a strong message to stand on. And the numbers speak for themselves too. According to Adobe, teams deliver new brand and country sites 66% faster and are 23% more productive after shifting to AEM.
How Assemble is Working to Be a Top AEM Partner to Our Clients
Assemble is signed on with Adobe with a Bronze Certification as part of their Solutions Partner Program (SPP). With most of our developers expected to be certified by late June 2022, here’s a little more insight into what that means so you know what they’ve been up to.
Adobe ACE/ACP certifications aren’t that easy to achieve.The process consists of successfully passing a 50-question, proctored test — both multiple choice and multiple select option. The questions are intentionally highly detail-oriented, yielding to professionals who work with the technology on a daily basis and put in the work to understand all of its nuances.
“From on-demand video training for their partners, live training sessions, and a comprehensive certification program that includes different levels — ACP-Professional, ACE-Expert, ACM-Master, Adobe’s support for developers is truly outstanding,” Fabian explained. “And at Assemble, we’re working hard for our clients to become a top partner in this platform. We continue to get a lot of requests for AEM developers as it becomes more dominant in the market, and so we’re doing what we have to so we can guarantee an excellent service for all of their AEM needs.”
