Day 01 - Introduction to AEM

It’s story time 💭

Three brothers, Tom, Dick, and Harry decided to open a confectionary that made muffins. They had a secret recipe (probably their granny gave them) for cooking muffins 😋 which made muffins tastier and cheaper than the other muffin brands in the market.

The three musketeers had a great product, and now they were ready to make a pile of money 💰. They opened their shop and waited and waited and waited for the customers to come but no one came. They were perplexed 😕 and pondered upon the cause, so they asked around, and they came to know that a very few people know about their confectionary.

What could be the reason? After pondering on it for a while they realized that they put all of their efforts into making their product better but devoted very little time to the marketing. Thus, due to the lack of proper marketing, even a great product suffered.

Moral of the story is: proper and targeted marketing is very important in today’s world for a business to succeed.

Digital Marketing

One of the major means of marketing is the internet i.e., online presence of an organization is very important. If you ask top companies that what is more important for them than their website and online presence, the answer will most probably be — NOTHING. You certainly want to tell the world — who you are and what you do.

From Wikipedia,

Digital marketing is the component of marketing that utilizes internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.

To facilitate this, Adobe Marketing Cloud (or Adobe Experience Cloud) is an amazing platform. Adobe’s marketing suite takes care of various aspects of digital marketing. It has tools like Adobe Campaign, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) that cover end to end every need of an enterprise in the Digital Marketing space.

In this article, we will dive deep into AEM only. We will discuss what it is and why enterprises are going gaga over it.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

At very high-level AEM is a content management system (or CMS) that is capable of building websites along with mobile apps, forms, and online communities.

It provides the maximum abstraction which allows the non-technical digital marketers to give the desired look and feel to their websites as per their respective business needs without involving their development/engineering team.

Along with this, all the digital assets of an organization can be managed in one place. By storing an organization’s digital assets in one place, it becomes easy to manage them.

Various tasks can be automated by using workflows.

AEM provides the capability of the real-time preview of the content on the website by incorporating WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) system.

AEM can tag, catalog and organize all digital assets, so they are ready to use and available as and when needed.

AEM has mainly following features -

Sites

• Here websites of an organization are created.
• AEM Sites have the capacity to build responsive, personalized sites that encourage customer engagement and retention.
• Authors and developers can easily manage and build the website. It is as easy as dragging and dropping content, images, and other media.

For more information on sites, see this.

Assets

• It is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool that helps an organization to manage all their assets (images, videos, documents etc) easily.
• We can “tag”, “annotate”, and “catalog” assets.
• Metadata of assets can be created/modified easily.

For more information on assets, see this.

Projects

• It lets us group resources into one entity.
• Resources can be assets, workflows, team information and many more.

To know more about projects, see this.

Communities

• It helps an organization to bond with their users by creating blogs, forums etc.
• Members of a community can use social logins such as Facebook and Twitter.

See this, to know more about the features AEM communities provide.

AEM Forms

• Document management system within the AEM which makes creating and managing forms and documents paperless, efficient and automated.
• Create interactive, personalized statements that can be accessed anytime from anywhere.
• Develop automated workflows, and merge form data and documents with your existing systems.

Also, see this for more information.

Why AEM (in case you’re still not convinced)?

After knowing, what is AEM in the above section, we will be discussing why do we need it?

Content Storage

AEM lets the organization store their content in the cloud which can be accessed by its members anywhere in the world at any time. This increases productivity and efficiency.

Tags and Metadata management

This lets the users tag their assets and modify the metadata of the assets which gives easy access.

Searching

This enables the users to search anywhere in the repository in no time. The users can search using various filters which are easily configurable.

Multi-Site Management (MSM)

This feature provides the maximum content reusability and allows the common content to be replicated in the multiple sites in no time. Configuring them is quite easy.

User Management

This allows an organization to give appropriate permissions to create, read, update, delete in the AEM to different users.

Integrations

It is very easy to integrate AEM with other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions such as Campaign, Analytics, Target etc. This allows taking full advantage of various Digital Marketing solutions and increases productivity. You can power your online presence end to end by integrating all these tools.

These are a few features that make AEM as a favorite choice for Content Management System based applications. For more reasons to use AEM, see here.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed high-level details about the Adobe Experience Manager and why is it a buzzword in the digital marketing space. This post sets the foundation of the intent of using AEM as a CMS. In the next post, we will see the basic building blocks of AEM and more technical details.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this post and would like to have suggestions from you to make this post better.

Happy Learning 😊 and Namaste 🙏.