Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 Major Highlighting Features
In the modern digital sphere, customer experience has become key for organizations and their brands to fuel and propel brand-customer interaction. Since its inception, Adobe Experience Manager has empowered organizations to innovate, optimize, and deliver content across all digital channels in a smarter and faster way. The latest Adobe Experience Manager 6.5, which was unveiled from the grand stage of the Adobe Summit 2019, has now been made available (April 2019) for the upgrade. There is a lot of buzz about the aem 6.5 new features and the stronger infrastructure included in the latest AEM to deliver the top-notch customer experiences.
Let’s have a look at some latest innovations, features, and enhancements included in it to help brands lead in Customer Experience Management.
- Magento & Experience Cloud integration:
This out of box integration was awaited since the acquisition of Magento by the Adobe in 2018. The integration has been made possible by the use of Adobe I/O Runtime. This Adobe I/O Runtime facilitates users with the ability to create custom microservices that can be consumed by any Adobe 3rd Party solutions. Also, many pre-built API connectors for Magento are shipped along with the latest Adobe Experience Manager 6.5. Apart from this, to understand the Magento integration better, AEM 6.5 is shipped with updated We.retail template along with e-commerce components - New Single Page Application (SPA) Capabilities:
AEM 6.5 addresses some of the challenges that come with the implementation of the single page application to deliver dynamic web experiences by including Single-Page Application (SPA) Editor. Also, the new SPA capabilities include the server-side rendering of client-side frameworks for enhanced page load and SEO purposes, along with integration with Adobe Target for personalization and Adobe Analytics for data and insights. Earlier, another biggest challenge for a SPA in a CMS was to allow marketers to author SPA content so that they continue to have a high content velocity. Adobe has addressed this issue in AEM 6.5 by introducing a JavaScript SDK that automatically recognizes SPA content and allows authors to edit the content as they would do with any traditional content. The new AEM 6.5 SPA Archetype automatically configures that SPA JavaScript SDK so that this doesn’t have to be done by the developer, which speeds up the implementation time. - Advanced Fluid Experiences:
Advanced Fluid Experience integration ensures the fast flowing of content across owned, earned and paid media channels. The unique combination of data and content in Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 helps brands to take customers on a variety of personalized journeys. Also, the marketers now have the ability to design, deliver and optimize experiences on digital displays in physical venues like – in-store screens or kiosks. The integration of Adobe Analytics has made it easy to optimize experiences by dynamically personalizing these signage content. - Advanced Integration of The Adobe Sensei To Experience Manager 6.5:
Previously, the integration of Adobe Sensei to AEM 6.4 has assisted users in customizing the design and content based on the individual customer preferences along with 360-degree view feature. Now powered by Adobe Sensei, the latest AEM 6.5 has been rolled out with some advanced features like – Smart Tagging of media assets, Visual Search, and Smart Crop. For understanding, with the help of Adobe Sensei, Smart Crop automatically identifies and crops the most significant part of a video or image to ensure that the most impactful part of the content is shown, irrespective of the size or orientation of the screen. Apart from this, the organizations using Adobe Managed Services for hosting will get new Autoscaling Services powered by Adobe Sensei in their Cloud Manager to automatically detect the increased demand and henceforth will generate the more online capacity to overcome that. - Integration with Adobe Creative Cloud:
The expectations to deliver personalized contents has made it mandatory for the brands to create streamlined and highly optimized contents for any digital channel. Earlier, AEM Assets users have experienced a high degree of resentment while integrating their AEM Assets implementations with their Creative Cloud applications. This issue has been resolved now by including Asset Link, which provides an AEM integration point and a Creative Cloud Custom Panel, allowing the creative users to see their entire AEM DAM in their Creative Suite. Now, creative users can easily browse the AEM DAM and reuse the assets without leaving creative applications such as – Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign.
- Staying in Sync With Connected Assets:
This improvement in AEM 6.5 is a huge benefit for large enterprise clients to simplify digital asset management across multiple instances. Often clients have multiple AEM Systems in their organization. There can be one instance of a centralized DAM and another for the website. This scenario can make it difficult to keep assets in sync across all the systems. The connected assets in AEM 6.5 allow AEM authors to see assets from other AEM instances when they are creating content. If any external asset is added, the local AEM instance will store a copy of the asset or refer to a remote asset and afterward a reference is added to the external system. - Advanced Security Along with Cloud Scale:
Today we live in a digital world which is highly fragile and prone to the hackers and so keeping this in mind the AEM 6.5 has been integrated with the SLA management, which is mandatory for the enterprise-grade security and architectural guidance. Apart from this, the various security levels are included for Sites, Assets, and Forms, to scale and adapt to the growing customer base of the organization. - Parallel Handling of Marketing, Creative, And IT Operations:
The integration of the new user interface has made it possible to work freely at marketing, creative, and IT operational level without causing hindrance to any other segment. Also, the Single-Page App (SPA) Editor helps you to use and collaborate with the latest front-end developer technologies and business associates for content. - Personalized Experience for The Customers:
The Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 comes with the Smart Layouts that has been powered By AI to give personalized brand experience to the customers. Based on the previous buying trends of the customer, the page automatically modifies the suggestions to suit them the best. Further, the use of Adobe Target helps to take personalization for the specific customer to the next level. - Seamless Upgrade To AEM 6.5:
We all know that last year Adobe introduced Cloud Manager as a continuous delivery pipeline for AEM code. Cloud Manager allows clients to deliver high-quality features and also simplifies the previously difficult process to upgrade to the latest version of AEM. To help more customers migrate to the latest version, Adobe is introducing frictionless updates for AEM via Cloud Manager. Starting with AEM 6.5, clients are empowered to easily upgrade their AEM version to ensure they have the most advanced, streamlined customer experience management tools. The automated workflow takes customers through several steps based upon Adobe’s best practices for upgrades.
Above we have discussed some of the important AEM 6.5 features, but the list doesn’t end here. To know more about AEM new 6.5 features or the ways in which it can transform your digital experience for your business, contact us today at +1-847-592-2926 or email at btallungan@nextrow.com. To know more about NextRow Digital and our services, visit us
NextRow Digital is a new age digital agency, and an Adobe Gold Partner, specializing in marketing cloud and technology implementations. With our extensive experience combined with a flexible, collaborative approach, we have helped clients meet their business needs successfully to overcome the challenges of the digital transformation and creating an omnichannel customer and e-commerce experiences.
Strategies and Challenges in Mobile App Testing
In this contemporary world, mobiles have become an integral part of our life, and it’s unimaginable to think of a life without it. Mobiles have gained an invincible space in the lives of humans and have evolved considerably faster than expected. According to an estimate, there will be about 5.5 Billion mobile users by 2020, which accounts for about 70 percent of the total world population. The mobile apps have portrayed an absolutely remarkable role in its monumental popularity. Today, we possess all kinds of mobile apps to perform almost every chore of our daily routine. In addition, businesses are increasingly finding it necessary to have an application to remain relevant and connected with their users. The usability and necessity of mobile apps have made it very essential to keep these flawless. The increase in app usage, followed by rapid mobile app development, has given birth to a critical need for a proper app testing process.
In the current scenario, it’s mandatory to implement the appropriate strategies during application development by recognizing the challenges an app can face in the real world. In this article, we are going to discuss some highly considerable challenges and strategies in mobile app testing process. Let’s first start with the challenges and then we will move towards strategies to overcome them.
Challenges In Mobile App Testing Services:
1.
App Performance And User Experience Issues:
The success of any mobile app is directly connected with the kind of user experience it provides to the users. An innovative, contextually appropriate and pre-defined user interface along with faster and uninterrupted performance impacts the preference of users. Bug-free apps with top-notch performance can easily convince your target consumers to download your application. Most users grades and rates the app on the basis of performance and experience delivered by it. This produces a direct effect on your app business because many new users choose applications based on previous reviews and ratings. Hence, an error or bug-free app along with the right user experience remain compelling factors to make that app sustainable in the market. Moreover, one must keep upgrading and improving the app to ensure users never consider leaving.
2.
Device Fragmentation:
Today, there are more than 24000 different types of Android devices (let alone iOS devices) available in the market, having different sizes, shapes, hardware, and software, posing a completely new set of challenges for the testers. The number includes all kinds of Mobile Phones, Pads, Tablets, Wearable tech and many more. This vast array of the devices has made it tougher for any quality team of testers to assure singular user experience and performance of the app, across different platforms, devices, and operating systems.
3.
Security:
Many personal and critical data are stored on the apps, so it’s highly crucial to provide the data privacy features in the apps. Testing the apps on the secure and the private cloud reduces the chance of data breaches and it also helps in recognizing security issues faster. Fixing problems before the production or the release of the app saves you a lot of money. According to an estimate, one can save 20 times the cost by fixing a bug before release than after the release.
4.
Too many Testing Tools:
Currently, there are excessive numbers of testing tools in the market, making it very hard to choose from. Most of the time we try searching for a tool that can handle all the mobile automation testing processes. But the fact is, there is no single tool that can satisfy all your testing needs. Each and every tool, either paid or open source, have their own limitations. Hence, it becomes imperative to have a sound strategy to prioritize your needs, totally based upon your understanding.
5.
Different Types Of Mobile Apps:
There are three currently available – Native, Web-based or Hybrid. As the implementation of these three apps is different from each other, their test case scenarios equally vary from one another. The differences are more evident while executing performance, stress, compatibility, and conformance testing. Native applications have lesser scope for testing, whereas, hybrid and web apps require both on and off platform testing. Web Apps primarily needs to be tested on the choice of browser versions, while Native and Hybrid apps require testing for execution, download, compatibility, platform interaction, and updates.
Here, I am wrapping up the challenges associated with the App Testing, and now, let’s jump to the strategies, which are must to overcome the challenges experienced in the mobile app testing.
Strategies For Mobile App Testing Services
1.
Device Matrix:
This is a significant factor because the selection of the testing device is made on the basis of the behavior of the target audience. By analyzing the market research, it becomes easier to determine the set of devices and Operating Systems that will have the highest occurrence. For Example — if the App supports both Android and iOS, but most of the users in your target market are using Android Devices like — Samsung, Google Nexus and Moto G devices and very few iPhones, then you can prioritize testing on the Google Nexus and Moto G above the iPhone device. In this scenario, the test plan will consist of testing on devices which are prioritized by your market analysis.
2.
Selection Of Emulators Or Physical Device:
One of the critical factors related to mobile app testing is the platform in which the testing will be performed. Whether the platform should be a physical device or an emulator depends upon nature of the test which needs to be carried out. Emulators can be utilized for user interface testing, and physical devices are most suitable for performance testing. Emulators can also be used to improve the cost-effectiveness of mobile app testing. There is no generalized opinion on which one is best for mobile app testing. Hence, it’s better to introspect the complete project and analyze the nature of testing required for it.
3.
Selection Of Cloud Or In-House Testing:
There must be a strategy to choose among Cloud or In-House Testing based on the testing requirements. Most of the time, we think that cloud testing is the best option, but we must understand that in-house solutions are handy for special requirements. The cloud is a useful tool to meet the need for mobility and teams located all over the world. Also, testing in the cloud can overcome obstacles like acquiring and maintaining many devices, as well as accessing the device pool from different locations. On the other hand, an in-house solution is more adaptable to individual needs – making it a perfect solution for companies that need an extra security layer and doesn’t want data to leave the office. It must be noted that due to the storage space limitation, the device choice will be limited.
4.
Prioritize The Security Of The App:
Security is one of the crucial factors which decides the success of any mobile app. The security breaches through mobile apps have cost Billions to users from all over the world. Due to this, modern-day users refrain from using apps having weaker security. Thus, the testing regime for a mobile app should also include security testing and methods such as static and dynamic analyzing test must be conducted to identify loopholes in the existing security architecture of the mobile app. To ensure a robust security mechanism, testing should also try to locate various vulnerabilities present in the app.
To summarize, an effective mobile testing strategy is the backbone to deliver reliable and high-performing apps. The challenges of mobile testing are often unique to each business, and hence the strategies to achieve the right solution will also vary. At the end of the day, nothing helps tackle challenges faster than partnering with the right associates. NextRow Digital can be a helping hand to you that has experienced QA teams to analyze, strategize and plan the test cases to carry out error-free testing of mobile apps. High performing app with top-notch and flawless features are our sole goal to deliver to our clients. To learn more about our mobile app testing services, visit us.
What Is Adobe Experience Cloud and How It Benefits You
The Digital arena has evolved significantly and continue to evolve. With the proliferation of smartphones, tablets come the skyrocketing customer expectations, brands are forced to rethink the strategies to win/retain their customers. To meet the contemporary competitive business landscape, marketers are constantly stressing the value of customer experience. Today, the idea of better user experience has become highly important and teams across advertising, sales, executive, and product development are recognizing the value of better user experience. The need for a cross-channel content delivery system is mandatory to keep everything in sync. Companies now need to meet various requirements to forge stronger connections with their customers, for brand loyalty and growth.
Vendors like Adobe, Salesforce are forefront in delivering integrated solutions for brands to leverage a single ecosystem to deliver a better experience for their audience.
Adobe’s cloud offerings went thru a major rebranding in the last couple of years and release “Adobe Experience Cloud” that integrates Marketing Cloud, Advertising Cloud, and Analytics Cloud. Adobe’s AI platform Sensei has since become an integral part of the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem and it continues to improve the platforms.
Major Components of Adobe Experience Cloud:
Adobe Marketing Cloud:
It offers an integrated set of world-class solutions that empower marketers to craft experiences that differentiate their brands, connect with customers and proactively engage them. Further, it includes Adobe Experience Manager (Its part of marketing cloud), Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Social, and Adobe Primetime, to helps brands to manage, personalize, optimize and orchestrate campaigns and customer journeys. T0 know more about Marketing Cloud Integration, follow the Link.
Adobe Advertising Cloud:
It’s the first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. Combining capabilities from Adobe Media Optimizer and recently acquired TubeMogul, Adobe Advertising Cloud simplifies the delivery of video, display and search advertising across numerous channels, screens, and touchpoints.
Adobe Analytics Cloud:
It’s a customer intelligence engine that powers businesses by enabling them to move from insights to action in real-time by uniquely integrating audience data across all Adobe clouds. Further, it combines Adobe Audience Manager, the leading data and audience management platform, and Adobe Analytics, a leading solution for applying real-time analytics and detailed audience segmentation across all marketing channels. Also, the availability of the open APIs and Adobe Sensei in the Adobe Analytics Cloud enables brands to better capture, aggregate, rationalize and understand vast amounts of their own disparate data and then translate that data into unique profiles of their customers.
It must be noted that apart from the above three components of the Adobe Experience Cloud, it can also be integrated with the Adobe Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.
Benefits of Adobe Experience Cloud:
Richer End-to-End Experiences Delivery:
The future experiences are believed to be heavily intertwined with intelligent systems such as Sensei and engaging one’s customer base through the use of AI and cloud technologies improves the journeys of both the customer and enterprise. Adobe Experience Cloud platform is all about designing for the future and we must understand that the experiences of tomorrow will require deep blending of content and data, powered by a common interface. Optimizing experiences has proven to make good business sense, and Adobe’s Experience Cloud lays the groundwork to make these experiences richer.
A single gateway to blend Data & Content:
Adobe Experience Cloud provides a single gateway to an enterprise for deploying throughout their businesses to measure, optimize, and personalize customer journeys at all touchpoints. The Adobe’s Experience Cloud keeps in sync every facet of a company — from advertising to product development and sales. Also, it comes with several tools that allow a business to express and extend the model to fit their specific needs. Enterprises can tailor the platform according to the way they want to interact with their customers. This is done by allowing disparate systems, such as content management, loyalty, and analytics solutions, to communicate freely with one another, which ultimately improves overall work efficiency.
Paperless Customer Experiences:
Adobe is giving a new dimension to the paperless customer experiences with enhanced integration between Adobe Experience Cloud and Document Cloud. Working together, Adobe Sign and Adobe Experience Manager Forms eliminate the cost and frustration of manual, paper-based processes for enrollment, onboarding, and service across the customer journey. the whole process has ultimately helped many organizations to go completely digital with credit card applications to government benefit forms or some other medical forms.
Streamlined and Accelerated creative workflow: (A Benefit That It Brings To The Internal Teams)
Every great experience starts with great design and now the availability of Creative Cloud with Adobe Experience Cloud has provided new heights to whole creative workflows. Marketers can now easily pull in content from Creative Cloud Libraries and edit images in Adobe Campaign to create and deliver personalized emails. Adobe Analytics and the Adobe Social Publishing Panel are also now available in Premiere Pro CC, enabling creative teams to publish video content across social media channels and receive real-time insights. In addition to these, Adobe Experience Manager’s digital asset management system can now automatically synchronize content based on shared metadata across Clouds to ensure that only the latest version of campaign assets is used.
The list of amazing features and benefits in Experience Cloud doesn’t end here, and the features listed here are some important features users typically look for. For detail information, you can call us directly at +1-847-592-2920 or E-mail us at sales@nextrow.com.
About NextRow
NextRow Digital is a new age digital agency, and an Adobe Solutions partner, specializing in marketing cloud and technology implementations. With our extensive experience combined with a flexible, collaborative approach, we have helped clients meet their business needs successfully to overcome the challenges of digital transformation. If you are also looking for a digital partner, then collaborate with us and leverage NextRow’s expertise.
4 New Features of Adobe Target to Personalize Mobile Users Experience
Today, customer experience is the bridge that connects the brand with existing and potential customers. Currently, of all other tools, none can match the personalization features and advanced capabilities that are included in Adobe Target for the Enhanced customer experience. It was first unveiled at the Adobe Summit of 2014 as an integral part of Adobe Marketing Cloud Suite. Later on, it was integrated with the Adobe Analytics Suite to enrich the marketing profile by leveraging its behavioral data. We all know that the contemporary digital period is being ruled by the mobile or smartphones, so digital marketing is revolving around it. Keeping this in mind and to let brands woo their mobile customers, Adobe has made several improvements in its Target tool. Let’s have a look at some major changes that have been incorporated by the Adobe in Target for Mobile Marketing.
1) Latest Visual Experience Composer:
This new feature makes the personalization experiments effortless on mobile apps and thus help you in creating robust Apps. We all know that App acts as the face and is very significant for every brand to reach their customers. To make any changes it needs to update the developer code and submit the changes to the respective App store, which makes it a time-consuming affair. Further, in the lengthy development processes, it may take a longer time period to accomplish and implement all the changes. With the latest new visual experience composer in the Adobe Target, one can easily exchange text and images in the native mobile app and can easily run A/B/n tests for all the changes. This feature helps you optimize the mobile experience and drive increased utility to your customers.
2) Adobe Target’s Batch Experience Prefetch For Mobile Apps:
Today, mobile devices let you connect with any brand from anywhere and at any time. Of all the internet traffics, about 60 percent is through the mobiles and so an always-on personalization for the mobile visitors is a must. Sometimes due to unavoidable situations or bad network connections, the interaction of users with your brand can be interrupted. This can be a lot frustrating on the users’ part and can be a loss of customer on your side as well. So, in lieu to overcome such situations, Adobe Target Batch Experience Prefetch feature can be very handy. It ensures always-on personalization even in the lack of proper internet by increasing the speed and performance of the App. It can be simply done by using Adobe Mobile SDK and letting Adobe Target fetch all the requests of visitors in batch. Then Target caches all this information on the EDGE network or on local, or both. So, whenever a visitor reaches out to your App, the Adobe Target quickly evaluates and delivers the required experiences throughout the App to the user. This ensures that visitors always have a personalized experience from any place and at any time.
3) Optimization of Node.js Websites and Applications:
Currently, almost every development work for websites and mobile apps are being carried out by using Node.js. It’s so because Node.js uses JavaScript, which makes it easier to port the code on both the client and server-side. Also, the overall development cycle can be increased because Node.js is available in the open source environment and one can get many reusable libraries developed by the other developers.
Apart from the above, the Adobe Target’s Node.js SDK let you optimize your website or mobile apps server side as well. Additionally, Adobe Target has built-in unified Visitor ID service, which lets you avail Adobe Analytics native integration features.
4) Mobile Experience Preview:
This a latest and a unique feature of Adobe Target that lets you test the experiences and personalize the content for the mobile users. One can perform the test based on the different global regional preferences and view the regional content variation directly on their device. Mobile Experience Preview also helps a brand to perform QA analysis of app activities without even activating them. Using this mobile experience preview feature, one just needs to create a preview link and send it to the mobile device and then click or paste the same link into any browser to see the impact it will generate. Along with this, one can also share this link with other stakeholders for review and approval purposes and members with that link can preview those before the live launch activity.
The above-discussed points are the latest changes made by Adobe to enhance Adobe Target Mobile Capabilities for advanced Personalization. We must understand that Today one need to deliver more personalized experiences to numerous consumers located globally. Adobe Target empowers marketers to create and deliver personalized experiences and is a game changer for digital personalization and provides much-needed help to marketers for maximizing revenue.
NextRow Digital, an Adobe Business Solution Partner, comes with vast experience and knowledge to effectively implement Adobe Target solution to your existing digital platforms. We have highly skilled professional and Adobe Certified digital consulting teams to deploy it and help you create a robust digital infrastructure. For any query or help contact us at +1-847-592-2920 or follow the link
How Is Digital Asset Management (DAM) Different from Content Management System (CMS)?
The amount of digital content generated every day is overwhelming for the enterprises. With the CMS platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, and enterprise platforms such as Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, it became easier to manage the content.
As the word “content” is used interchangeably to talk about text, images, videos, documents alike, people do get confused between CMS platforms and Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms. Let’s look into these platforms and see what they are used for the most.
Content Management System (CMS) Platforms:
The Content management systems (CMS) were initially created as a means to simplify website content delivery processes. It provides the user a core hub to edit and publish content, with the user-friendly interface. CMS comes in various forms based on the content it manages and is designed for non-technical users to stop worrying about the behind-the-page aspects of website management. Content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, Magnolia are most popular and are used widely in SMB market. CMS platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Acquia are used mostly in enterprise space for their reliability, extensibility, integration capabilities to enterprise marketing platforms such as Eloqua, Adobe Campaign, ExactTarget.
The Benefits of CMS:
I covered only a few important features of CMS platform here. This is not the entire features list and each platform has it’s own unique features, which are covered in other blogs, such as “Adobe Experience Manager Overview“.
1) Decoupling the content creation process from web development
Content is key for every site. New content refreshes the site, increases the search ranking and makes visitors spend more time on the site. Before CMS, developers used to update the content combined with their weekly or nightly builds. This became painful for business teams who need the fresh content right then on demand. CMS platforms decouple the content creation process from web development, which helps business update the content on the site as and when they need.
2) Ability to create pages on demand
CMS platforms empower the business teams to add/update/delete pages as needed without relying on IT. This saves a lot of time and money for the business as the business can create the pages using existing templates without relying much on IT.
3) Site management is made easy
With CMS, the dependency on IT to manage the site is gone. Business can manage the site on their own without overly relying on IT.
4) Centralized backend admin interface
The admin interface lets you manage everything easily. However, this gets complicated in enterprise-grade CMS platforms.
WordPress is the most used CMS out there. However, it’s mainly used by individuals and many small businesses. Enterprise web CMS space is dominated by Adobe with the popular Adobe Experience Manager product for it’s open architecture, easy to integrate and Adobe marketing cloud native integration.
Digital Asset Management:
With the enormous growth of digital footprint, comes the pain of managing all the digital assets, tag them properly, find them when needed to re-use or alter to the current needs. Digital Asset Management platforms help organize documents, images, videos, presentations, InDesign files, Photoshop files, PDFs etc. It acts as a centralized digital library for organizing, searching and converting files to provide clients and employees an access to all digital assets with ease and simplicity. We all know that companies invest a lot of time and money in the production of digital. But many companies do little or have inefficient ways to manage these digital assets and end up creating new when other teams need them. DAM platforms will not only centralize the assets, but also help find when needed with proper setup. To allow these digital assets for re-use, the digital assets must maintain relevant metadata in a DAM, which includes information about the asset. This helps users accessing these files can instantly know all technical details such as image size, resolution and color depth as well as contextual information like author, license rights, approval status, etc. Today, DAM is used by almost every large corporations and successful brands to streamline the workflow among their internal teams and clients. Key aspects of DAM are setting up right taxonomy and enforcing the taxonomy to yield better results over long term.
Benefits of DAM:
Business evolved from storing the digital assets on network folders to online drives and eventually to a more robust Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms. Irrespective of the client’s industry, DAM became a central point for all digital assets. Enterprise DAM platforms such as AEM DAM help clients not only to store, but also with robust finding/retrieval capabilities, combined with Artificial Intelligence (Adobe Sensei) and out-of-box as well customizable workflows, marketing platform integrations, and robust tagging capabilities. DAM improves overall team efficiency and helps in cutting down on admin, design, and production costs, by streamlining approval processes and improving asset reuse. Today, Digital Asset Management Implementation has become a critical part of all major companies willing to keep a synchronize workflow among their marketing, creative, or IT teams.
DAM vs CMS? What’s the right fit for me?
Start with your needs. Are you looking to build a site to manage the content on your own without the need for developer? You have lot of text that’s available on your site for your visitors to present in HTML format? Then, CMS would be your choice.
If your need is to manage your digital assets such as PDF, documents, images, videos, then you should be opting for DAM.
NextRow does help clients to evaluate the needs and suggest the right platforms. Reach out to sales@nextrow.com to help you with your needs.
Five Best Digital Asset Management Vendors for Your DAM Needs
In the digitally fast-paced world, the need for managing digital assets like – images, videos, PDF, word documents, spreadsheet, in an efficient and secure way is mandatory for any organization. Especially for the large enterprises, as they often have terabytes of assets to handle. Enterprises have specific needs for robust digital asset management processes and tools that offer advanced feature sets for storing assets, securing intellectual property, enabling discovery through the keyword search, and more. For this very reason, from past few years, a central repository system like DAM (Digital Asset Management) has gained a lot of popularity. It’s a very handy tool to keep in sync all data with marketing, IT and creative teams, within the organization and letting them access all these very efficiently.
Basically, Digital asset management tool has taken the place of physical storage spaces and even traditional internal servers by offering a more organized and retrievable solution by streamlining the process of storing, archiving, searching, retrieving and circulating files. The selection of right Digital Asset Management Software depends on products features, functionality, integration capabilities, product architecture, future roadmap, implementation costs, vendors availability to support and more.
Many customers reach us asking us to do vendor-neutral assessment of DAM platforms. After helping many clients with these analysis, I have put together a few contenders (note this is not a complete list, many are omitted here for ease of reading. The DAM vendors we evaluate vary based on the client needs. I have mentioned a few common names only).
1.
Cumulus DAM By Canto:
Cumulus is a flagship enterprise DAM technology by Canto that allows clients to efficiently secure, repurpose and distribute brand assets. The latest version of it is Cumulus 11 that comes with image recognition powered by two artificial intelligence providers – EyeEm Vision and Clarifai. Cumulus uses sophisticated metadata information of digital assets to store, search, sort, track changes and also enables you to publish your brand assets on multiple platforms and channels. It has been powered by Amazon Web Services to deliver images efficiently across the globe and also eliminates duplicate and variant media files across enterprise systems.
2.
WebDAM:
WebDAM is a cloud-based tool and is among leading Digital Asset Management Vendor that delivers top DAM solutions for all types of business. Its DAM tool has capabilities to automate and streamline common tasks, clearing the way for creative and marketing teams to work faster and deliver more impact. WebDAM is capable of uniting various teams on a common, cloud-based platform and keeps them in sync throughout the creative asset lifecycle. Also, it provides one-click access to publish assets across marketing channels to keep you connected with your customers.
3.
A DAM Software:
A DAM Software, also known as Aprimo Digital Asset Management, is an enterprise DAM solution which delivers engaging customer experiences across different stages of content lifecycles. ADAM also has a combination of marketing operations technology and digital asset management software, giving marketers the advantage to govern and grow their brand. It’ an innovative suite available in both cloud or on-premise, for enterprises of all sizes. In 2017, ADAM released an integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, which is critical for many creative and marketing teams.
4.
OpenText MediaBin:
OpenText MediaBin is a digital asset management solution available with both on-premise and the cloud. It delivers a superior customer experience by effectively managing, reusing, distributing, and publishing thousands of customer-facing digital assets. It has support for all business users including enterprises and provides tailored role and permission-based, self-service access. With permission-based workflows, it empowers your team to clearly and effectively communicate your brand to your customers. It Understands and analyzes abundant media assets by automatically tagging, categorizing, and cross-referencing them.
5.
Adobe Experience Manager DAM:
The AEM DAM tool is designed to fit into a team’s existing processes and workflows while acting as a centralized repository for an enterprise’s digital assets. Adobe’s most unique feature among other enterprise DAMs is its native integration capability with the Creative Cloud tools. This integration brings the added value to the teams, as they can stay involved with their respective work and don’t always have to break workflow to find the right assets they need. Other noting features included in the AEM DAM are search and metadata management, dynamic media support, and the ability to provide personalized media experiences to global audiences of clients.
The list doesn’t end here, and the features listed here are only a few important features clients typically look for. NextRow, a leading DAM implementation partner for many Fortune 500 clients, helps with vendor-neutral analysis for the clients to select the best DAM based on their needs, not based on industry bests. For a detailed analysis of your DAM needs, please call us today @ +1-847-592-2920 or E-mail us at sales@nextrow.com
Disclaimer:
The above comparison is not a complete list, and is my personal view only. Any omittance of features is not intentional and tried my best to give as much information as possible. Feel free to reach me directly at akumar@nextrow.com for any suggestions/corrections. I will be glad to incorporate.
Use Case For i18n In AEM: Converting Components Language Based on User Preference
As an Author, at some point, you must have felt the agony of not having the language support other than English in the component’s fields. This becomes even more dire for the multinational organizations who have regional authors. Realizing this, AEM has come up with a unique feature ‘i18n’, enabling Internationalization of components and dialog’s so that the UI strings can be presented in different languages. Components that are designed for internationalization enable UI strings to be externalized, translated, then imported to the repository and on the basis of the user’s preference, the displayed language in the UI is determined. It’s worth mentioning that it has been named “i18n” because there are 18 characters between ‘I’ and ‘N’ in the word ‘INTERNATIONALIZATION’.
Developers at NextRow Digital has used this ‘i18n’ feature to change the component’s fields and the same is being presented below in the form of use-case to understand the enablement of the ‘i18n’ in AEM more profoundly.
Here, we want to add multiple languages to title and description component.
Step 1: Navigate to the component path which you want to be multilingual.
Step 2: Create a folder named ‘i18n’ under the component (here, it is ‘titleanddescription‘).
Step 3: Create a folder with name as language code (ISO code). For ex: En for English, de for German, for for French etc.
Step 4: Click on the ‘Mixins’ from the tool bar.
Step 5: Click on ‘+’ button in Mixins window and add ‘mix:language’ property and after that Click ‘OK’.
Step 6: Add ‘jcr:language’ property to the same ‘en’ node. And it’s value is the language code (ex: en)
Step 7: Create two nodes under ‘en’ node of type ‘sling:messageEntry’. Names of the nodes can be anything (preferably keep the FieldLabel names of the dialog), and later on we will use this same Name for configuring the component’s dialog.
In this case, I have created ‘training.title’ and ‘training.description’ to give more sense to the names because my component has two fields ‘title’ and ‘description’.
Step 8: Add ‘sling:message’ property with value. To recall, the value of respective language depends on the language node that you are in.
Here, as we are in ‘en’ node, writing the value as ‘Description’ in English. See below images for more understanding.
Here, I am in German(de) node. So, the value has ‘Description’ as ‘Beschreibung.
Step 9: Similarly, create the same folder structure from Step 6 to Step 8 for all the languages that you want to have for the component.
Step 10: Navigate to the component’s dialog fields and add values to the ‘fieldLabel’ property. Values are the node names under language folder.
Step 11: Navigate to the User Admin page(‘http://localhost:4502/useradmin’).
Search for the username for which you are logged in ( by default it is ‘admin’). Click on the Preferences tab and select the language from the drop-down that you want the component to be displayed in.
Step 12: Navigate to the page where your component is authored and click on ‘edit’ and here you can see that the field names are displayed in the language you have selected in user preferences. Here, I have selected display language as ‘French’.
Above, we have just presented a simple use case to understand working process of i18n (Internationalization) for AEM. Apart from this the ‘i18n’ can also be used by multi-national multi-lingual websites. These websites often use translation vendor for a page translation and they pay the vendors on the basis of word-by-word. In multi-national multi-lingual websites, there are always some labels/text-strings which remain same and because of this, it doesn’t make sense to have them translated with a translation vendor every time they send a page for translation. To tackle this issue of those websites, the AEM provides a separate in-built ‘i18n’ translator tool, where all these labels/text-strings and their translated content is stored and can be used as many times as required (Of course, without any payment). In conclusion, we can say that i18n is a powerful, versatile tool that comes with AEM to Internationalize your components and dialogs to display UI strings in different languages. If you have any query then do let us know, we would be more than happy to help.
NextRow Digital is a new age digital agency & an Adobe Business Solution Partner with many third party and Adobe Marketing Cloud implementations under its belt. For the years we have helped our clients meet their business needs successfully to overcome the challenges of digital transformation. To know more about us, visit our website. And if you require any of our services then let us know by sending mail at sales@nextrow.com or call directly and have a chat with our expert 1-847-464-8091.
Adobe Experience Cloud Platform: Empowers and Creates Experience Business
The contemporary digital sphere is advancing leaps and bounds, and each passing minute is adding enormous and complex data in the digital storehouse of the companies. The data is streaming inside through website, apps, social platforms, email campaigns, along with call center and in-store customer interactions. This never-ending data inflow makes the task of businesses even more daunting to harness it in the best interest of your digital business. It must be noted that to deliver a compelling customer experience, an SMB or Enterprise needs to do several things like – knowing customers, communicating through various touch-points, and most importantly delivering value time and again to exceed customer expectations.
Adobe has come up with the ‘Adobe Experience Cloud solutions‘ that lets you harness the digital data in the most advanced way and comes with many essential tools to accomplish various tasks related to content, data, intelligent services, and open APIs. Adobe Experience Cloud gives you a 360-degree understanding of your customers and also helps in creating dynamic experiences for them, irrespective of channels or touchpoints they use. Apart from all these, the Adobe has also formed a partner ecosystem to deliver tools and integrate custom solutions to empower companies in creating experience business. NextRow Digital is also an eminent part of this Adobe Partner ecosystem and has successfully integrated custom solutions to a wide range of businesses. To know more about our work and services visit our website
Some Major Aspects of Adobe Experience Cloud Platform:
1) Power of Machine Learning:
The use of the machine learning and the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of Adobe Sensei, available in the Adobe Cloud Platform, provides a central store and central execution engine and draw deeper insights from all the available data. Which in return, helps businesses to understand the customer behaviors in the much efficient way.
2) API-First Approach:
The open APIs available in the Adobe cloud platform makes it even more powerful because it has been built using an API-first approach, making the system open to developers, technology partners, and third-party software companies. These all can easily add and integrate their solutions and build their own products to further enhance the capabilities of Adobe solutions and provide custom integration as per their need and requirement.
3) Inclusion of Partner Ecosystem:
The Adobe partner ecosystem is a group of 600 renowned technology and software solution firms (We are also one of the Adobe Solution Partner), working tirelessly to integrate new dimensions and capabilities to Adobe Cloud. The main aim of this ecosystem is to add features in the existing Adobe Cloud and provide out-of-the-box solutions to the clients, that will create great experiences for their respective customers.
4) Building an Experienced Business:
A frictionless business experience is a mandatory factor to boost the customer engagement with your brand. The machine learning and an open APIs, available on the Adobe Cloud platform, helps you integrate new tools to make the most out of your technology investment. Further, the inclusion of the partner ecosystem, that permits an additional digital marketing and implementation expertise, helps the businesses to get a 360-degree view of the audience, allowing to speak in one note across every touchpoint and digital channels.
NextRow, an Adobe Experience Cloud Business Solution Partner, comes with vast experience and knowledge to effectively implement Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to your online business. We have highly skilled professional Adobe Certified digital consulting teams to deploy it and to help you create a robust Adobe Experience Cloud platform that empowers a seamless engagement and interaction with your customers through every digital touch-points. For any query or help contact us at +1-847-592-2920
Know All About New Digital Asset Management Capabilities Included in AEM 6.4
In today’s world, Data is the bread and butter of all the digital businesses, and Content Management System (CMS) is considered as the powerhouse to execute all the web-based functionaries. To ease the online business doing, there are many Content Management Systems available, but, the one that has garnered most of the attention from Enterprises, is Adobe Experience Manager CMS. Over the years, the AEM has gone through various changes to accommodate more features to assist businesses in the best possible ways and in a much easier and efficient manner.
Continuing the previous trends, this year also Adobe has launched the latest Adobe Experience Manager 6.4, that comes with many changes and alluring features. Out of all, the various advanced and new capabilities included in the AEM assets is at the center of all talks. Adobe has gone beyond DAM’s traditional focus on storage and has included exciting new technologies for workflows, dynamic imaging, search, and distribution. The latest AEM 6.4 also comes with the improved performance and enhanced search and metadata features to help marketing teams work on, find and use assets faster. Let us look at some of the top-notch DAM features that have been rolled out with the latest Adobe Experience Manager 6.4.
1.
Asset Search Improvements:
Prior to AEM 6.4, one could not search by folder name in Omni Search option, however, now one can either search by file name or folder name or both. It also allows you to filter the assets by their MIME type (.png, .jpg, .tiff, .svg, .psd etc) to refine the search results.
It has also implemented the changes on the search results page and has added New Search back button with an ability to navigate to a search item and come back to the same position in search results without running the search query again. Next and Previous buttons are also added to navigate to assets in a folder instead of clicking each one by one.
2.
Browsing Improvements:
AEM 6.4 presents users with a Content Tree rail in combination with list view to easily navigate assets hierarchy. It also has an improved lazy loading experience in the card and list view when it comes to browsing a huge number of assets.
3.
Keyboard shortcuts:
AEM 6.4 comes with some keyboard shortcuts in assets such as (m) for Move operation, (p) for navigation to properties page, (ctrl+c) for copy operation and backspace for delete and many more. With this feature, now you don’t have to always use the mouse and can also use the keyboard shortcuts as well.
4.
Meta Data Schemas:
AEM 6.4 now has a ‘3rd tab’ called ‘Rules’ (as shown in the image below), from here you can control and determine whether a value for a field is required or not. Also, you can change the visibility of the field depending on custom rules.
5.
Metadata Management Capabilities:
AEM 6.4 includes multiple advanced metadata management capabilities to manage metadata at scale and enforce metadata integrity through rules and validations. New Bulk Metadata Export capability enables you to export (all or selective) metadata for the large number of assets in CSV format for editing, sharing, and third-party integration. In similar fashion, the New Bulk Metadata Import capability has been included for importing CSV file for adding new metadata, updating existing metadata for multiple assets in one go. This feature is useful in case you need to do any bulk updates for metadata.
6.
Asset Reports:
AEM 6.4 has major asset reporting enhancements:
- A new reporting UI where users can generate reports on their own by specifying different folder paths, date range etc.
- A feature to generate report instantly or at a future date & time.
- It includes few new reports such as Disk Usage report and Files report.
- It allows adding custom columns/fields to reports such as Asset Upload report, Asset Download report.
- A report purge functionality used to delete reports which are no longer required.
7.
Insights View Option:
If you have configured AEM with insights then you can get the insights view as well along with the list, column, and card view options.
Apart from the above, AEM 6.4 Assets also comes with Smart translation search and Smart tags using Adobe Sensei – an Artificial Intelligence tool developed indigenously by Adobe.
1.
Adobe Sensei Powered Smart Translation Search:
AEM 6.4 has introduced Smart Translation Search capability to support multilingual search, which enables globally distributed teams across multiple locales to access and search in different languages without having to go through costly and time-consuming translation workflows. Multi-lingual search supports more than 50 global languages and is based on open source library Apache Joshua.
2.
Enhanced Smart Tags Powered by Adobe Sensei:
With AEM 6.4 the Adobe has enhanced the SmartTags launched with AEM 6.3. The latest Smart Tags will instantly help the marketers in discovering the relevant images by the use of a self-learning algorithm powered by Adobe Sensei. This algorithm helps in fetching images and populates tags based on the unique business classification and also plays a vital role when new assets are introduced into the DAM, by identifying and creating unique tags. Along with the Smart Tags, some new tools have also been added to help the DAM admins by empowering them to automatically import, export, curate, extract, manage, administer, and govern metadata for large repositories of digital assets.
In the above article, we have discussed some latest DAM capabilities in AEM Assets, if you have any queries regarding the AEM 6.4 or AEM Assets and the ways in which it can transform your digital experience for your business, then do ask us. Email sales@nextrow.com today to discuss your current or next Adobe project at +1-847-592-2920.
Adobe Acquires Magento: Experience Cloud Will Soon See Native Commerce Capabilities
Adobe – the market leader in multimedia and creativity software products, announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Magento Commerce, a leading e-commerce platform, for $1.68 billion. The deal is in the final stage and will be accomplished until the third quarter of 2018, at the above-stated value, subject to customary purchase price adjustments (Recently Adobe announced that it completed the transaction). Adobe through its press release has emphasized that the addition of the Magento Commerce Cloud will enable e-commerce businesses to be seamlessly integrated into the AEM Cloud, creating a single platform to serve both B2B and B2C customers globally.
We all know that in the digital world, content and data have been the most significant factors for designing and delivering digital experiences, and undoubtedly Adobe Experience Cloud Suite is best in the market that excels on both front. The extensive features included in Experience Cloud has attracted top B2B and B2C companies of this world, making it a leader in digital experience services. With the time, commerce has entered the digital space and is now an integral part of the customer digital experience. Customers want an Experience-driven commerce on the web, mobile, social media, in-product or in-store and to be the best on this front as well Adobe is acquiring the Magento. The Adobe acquisition of Magento will add the much-needed commerce element to the Creative to Campaign Adobe suite.
Let’s now introspect the positives of this Magento Acquisition by the Adobe:
* In the past, Adobe joined hands with many commerce platforms, but, still couldn’t offer a tighter commerce platform as part of its Experience Cloud suite. This merger will fill this void and now they can have an indigenous e-commerce platform to their Adobe Suite.
* Adobe can leverage the integration of the order management and predictive intelligence into their Experience Cloud to enhance B2B and B2C for the commerce industries like consumer-packaged goods, retail, wholesale, manufacturing and the public sector.
* Magento has prebuilt extensions, including payment, shipping, tax, and logistics, that will give Adobe Experience Cloud an ability to quickly revamp, and add next-generation commerce capabilities.
* Over the years, Magento has become the commerce platform for many big and mid-size companies including Coca-Cola, Canon, Helly Hansen etc. This gives Adobe an advantage with marketing-to-sale insight potential to complete their customer journey.
* Adobe and Magento have some big common clients like – Coca-Cola, Warner Music Group, Nestle and Cathay Pacific and they will definitely be benefitted most because of this integration of Magento to Adobe Experience Cloud.
* Magento is an open source platform that has 315,000 developers, 800 technology partners, and 350 systems integrators, and now all these will be a part of the Adobe ecosystem, bringing the power of Magento community to Adobe Experience Cloud Platform.
We can summarize this whole deal in the words of Adobe president and chief executive Shantanu Narayen, who said, “commerce is an integral part of the end-to-end customer experience and today customers expect every interaction to be shoppable”. The acquiring of Magneto showcases the commitment of Adobe in enhancing AEM Cloud platform to strengthen the enterprises to deliver top-notch Experience Businesses.
NextRow Digital, an Adobe Business Solutions Partner with AEM specialization, can integrate Adobe Experience Cloud to your existing digital platform, enabling you to deliver the best digital experience throughout the customer journey. To discuss your current or next Adobe project with us, contact us at –+1-847-592-2920, or visit us or email us
Digital Trends of 2018 That Will Change the Face of Adobe Experience Manager
In this contemporary period, the technology is changing at a very rapid pace. The year 2017 saw the surge in AI and machine learning based innovations and the same trends are expected to reach newer heights in 2018 with emerging technologies like voice, facial recognition, virtual reality, and augmented reality. The AI has also generated ‘Hue and Cries’ from many leading intellectuals from all the corners of this planet. There is a lot of discussion and concern over the future of AI and machine learning and the way it can impact humanity or affect the job market. However, the above-mentioned technologies and discoveries are all set to be carried forward, hence, it’s obvious that these will also change the face and future of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and other Adobe Experience Cloud products.
Let us look at some digital trends for 2018 along with some of the latest developments in Adobe and also the challenges and opportunities that are standing in the way of AEM and other Adobe Experience Cloud products.
- Improved AI Features:
The current digital world is expected to see a 360 degree turn around with the emergence of improved AI and Machine Learning features. It’s because the AI and machine learning are much more advanced at analyzing and understanding text and images, but, we have to accept that both are still in incubating stage and will take some more time before we can be leveraged with all its amazing features.
Analyzing the potential and scope of AI, the Adobe had also launched it’s indigenous AI platform dubbed as Adobe Sensei in 2017. The main aim is to create cross-platform and proprietary based on artificial intelligence to power solutions like Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud. In AEM also, the Adobe Sensei has been integrated for features like smart tags in Assets and summarize text in the content fragment. In the coming years, it can be said that the potential of Adobe Sensei will completely change the overall experience of digital marketing. It will not only understand the singular piece of content but will also understand the larger content and experience. It will also be capable enough to assist us in becoming a more creative and better decision maker in real-time.
- More Immersive Experience:
The products like Amazon Echo powered by Amazon Alexa and Google Home powered by Google Assistant, draw a lot of attention, which ultimately led to nearly 300% increase in their sales in 2017 (Billboard). And now the tech world is buzzing with the upcoming Apple HomePod powered by Siri, which is all set to reach the market by next month. The increase in these products and the personal assistants has made one thing clear that we are becoming really very fond of technologies with the human touch. Further, the 360 photos and video based on the integration of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) has made the users awestruck and the AR & VR handsets are helping us to immerse in the new world of entertainment. These headsets are not just allowing you to see it on the screen but feel it in front of your eyes. It is being expected that the new developments of VR and AR in 2018 may bring more prospects to the immersive experience and can also be a game-changing revolution in digital marketing.Currently, AEM has the features to create, streamline, support and manage a consistent and immersive customer experience that will be soon extended to the Adobe Experience Cloud products. AEM comes with support for 3D assets, from which you can upload, create and render a 3D image. Also, AEM has structured content fragments and content services ability which enables export of content to phone app or Amazon Alexa. Adobe is also expected to soon integrate 360 assets to AEM dynamic media as well.
- Personalization:
The digital marketing and experience business will see some advanced features with regards to the personalization feature. As we all know that the personalization is the core of online business and it helps enterprises to target their current and potential customers.
With Adobe you have three major weapons to execute the Personalization process for every single user. The first one is with the AEM, second with the help of Adobe Target, and third is the combination of both i.e. AEM, Target and Analytics (Adobe analytics). AEM gives content creators an opportunity to create and manage experience content in the same tool. It also comes with Assets, Content Fragments, Experience Fragments etc. to provide a more personalized experience to the users. Adobe Target empowers marketers by helping them creating more advanced A/B testing and multivariance testing. It also has Adobe Sensei features that have Random Forest algorithm for automated personalization, to use Search & Promote for site search and e-commerce.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that Adobe has moved forward and is a step closer in the direction of omnichannel personalization. It has launched the Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 during the Adobe Summit 2018 and on the personalization front, the AEM 6.4 comes with the Smart Layouts powered By Adobe Sensei to give the personalized brand experience to the customers across all touch points.
If you have any questions regarding the AEM 6.4 and the ways in which it can transform your digital experience for your business, then do ask from us. Contact us today to discuss your current or next Adobe project at +1-847-592-2920
