Adobe Experience Manager - an editor's dream!

abril 07, 2016

The decision to implement a new content management system (CMS) is often based on many different factors, but they usually all boil down to monetary considerations one way or the other and by defining an expected ROI. 

One has to remember though, that a CMS is only an empty shell, and without high quality content there really is not much for the site visitors to engage with. This means that having a strong and intuitive user interface for the editors and marketing team to enter content becomes a critical parameter and prerequisite for a meaningful implementation and successful business transformation and in the end... the expected ROI.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a high-end content management system that offers a really strong user interface “behind the scenes” enabling the business to communicate across all digital touch points. Valtech has successfully executed many implementations over the years, and in our experience especially some key features resonate very well with our clients:

Drag and drop… as easy as 1, 2, 3

AEM supports drag and drop of approved components (like a free form Rich Text Editor, a columned text area, a video component or a hero image etc.) from the available libraries onto the templates of your website. If you can operate a mouse this is just about the easiest and most intuitive way to create new additions to your page, while enforcing a positive editor experience. The drag and drop feature of AEM not only makes it fast and convenient to add components to a new page, but also supports the ability to move components around on the page itself. A feature like this makes it a breeze to quickly review different options (maybe from a lay-out perspective or from an editorial point of view) before publishing the page to the live environment. This really allows for a seamless editor workflow, and an opportunity to create many different combinations within a predefined framework.

Copy and paste… an oldie, but a goodie!

Just as easy as drag and drop are the good old copy paste capabilities, which also are supported by AEM. This can be applied on a component level, and makes it extremely easy and fast to add content, while maintaining uniform formatting (font type, font size and font colouring, alignments (left, right, justified) and bullet lists etc.) across the template. The copy and paste feature also supports selecting multiple components simultaneously, so that the editor can copy and paste an image, a headline and body text in one go, and then make the content changes as needed afterwards. The copy and paste feature works within a single template, or you can copy and paste from one template to another. The feature also supports the traditional keyboard short cuts that are well known on both Windows (CTRL + C and CTRL + V) and Mac computers.

“One Adobe”

“One Adobe” is a catchy way to describe that the different Adobe offerings in the Creative Cloud (like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Adobe Premiere Pro) and Document Cloud (Acrobat) integrate nicely together with AEM. In other words you can now create and manage your assets in Creative Cloud (designers, for instance), and have the content editors or marketing team push the assets into the appropriate channels using AEM and staying within the same digital ecosystem all the way. Combine this with sophisticated approval workflows and permissions, and you have a unique and seamless “one-stop shopping” experience with Adobe that bridges the gap that traditionally exists between teams and their preferred applications.

A current AEM project - that is being implemented by Valtech for a multinational pharmaceutical company - involves developing and configuring a global master platform that enables the company to swiftly set up websites for local markets. This requires a strong and intuitive user interface that can easily be understood and utilized by content editors and marketing teams from many different cultures and with low technical knowledge. That is one of the reasons that this client chose AEM and at a recent demo spontaneously expressed “Wow! Setting up a new page and editing content is SO easy. This is awesome!”.

AEM also includes strong personalization features for increased customer engagement and conversion rates that are easily configured by the marketing team, but that’s a topic for another time :-)

Adobe and Valtech’s relationship is founded on satisfying our clients' needs. At this years' Adobe Summit you can learn about combining creativity, content and data to create compelling experiences for your customers!