What is Adobe Experience Manager? Everything You Need to Know About AEM
We live in a world where digital touchpoints shift at lightning speed, and people navigate multiple channels with just a click of a button. Speed, convenience, and connected digital experiences aren’t just nice-to-have website features; they’re must-haves. The businesses’ online presence and seamless navigation are as vital to a business as its products, customers, and employees. What is Adobe Experience Manager for the online presence of a business? Let’s dig a little deeper.
Your clients and audience rely more on your digital experiences and prefer an exceptional journey throughout. Adobe Experience Manager Sites can help you meet the right audience at the right place and time.
What is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?
Adobe Experience Manager is a powerful enterprise content management solution that combines digital asset management and content management for a robust solution to create and deliver personalized experiences at scale. It is a unified solution that helps create, maintain, optimize, and deliver unimaginable digital experiences across various touch points and channels.
How Does Adobe Experience Manager Work?
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) empowers brands to create a simplified, streamlined, and omnichannel experience across channels that integrates multiple functions and solutions into a single platform with flexibility and scalability as required.
AEM facilitates content personalization, immersive multimedia (videos and images) content, targeted marketing campaigns, data insights with conversion rates, customer segmentation, and key performance metrics to align your strategies with your audiences and market. Read more in the Guide to Adobe Experience Cloud.
Adobe Experience Manager works by integrating these solutions: Content Management System (CMS), Digital Asset Management (DAM), Digital Enrollment and Forms, Digital Screens, Digital Guides, and Adobe Learning Manager into a single platform for a complete solution.
What are the 6 Modules of Adobe Experience Manager CMS?
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) integrates these six core modules into a single platform that brings ease to digital navigation and website management for enhanced omnichannel experience with personalization.
1. Adobe AEM Sites
Adobe AEM Sites or Experience Manager Sites is a module that empowers you to create, design, manage, optimize, and publish website content experiences on sites, mobile sites, and other channels across various geographical locations and native languages. You also get the freedom to personalize your content for your target audience using the functionalities and tools. It also helps you create and manage responsive designs and mobile sites with shopping cart optimization for a unified virtual experience across devices of the customer’s choice. Along with this, it stores and organizes digital assets for team members to access when needed.
2. Digital Asset Management (DAM)
Source : Adobe Experience Manager Assets
AEM’s digital asset management (DAM) functionality provides a cloud-based centralized asset management to organize, store, access, and retrieve rich and personalized digital media content for your digital business across channels. DAM is a wonderful tool for accessing all your digital assets, including videos, audio, images, documents, logos, presentations, and 3D models, for easy access to all your teams in a shared environment with track changes and revision history capabilities. It makes it easy to search for digital assets by automatically adding Metadata and Meta tags to them. Adobe AEM DAM integrates assets to Creative Cloud that align the creative and marketing workflows. It helps you gain uniformity according to the branding guidelines for various digital assets across channels and social media platforms.
3. AEM Digital Enrollment & Forms
Adobe Experience Manager enables true digital transformation with a digital enrollment and onboarding journey for your customers and their clients. It is a complete paperless document solution with digital enrollment and responsive forms for your customers to easily fill out and then digitally sign in an automated workflow. It eliminates the need for dozens of email conversations and paper printing and speeds up the onboarding process.
4. AEM Edge Delivery Services
Adobe Experience Manager’s Edge Delivery Service is the latest addition to its all-encompassing CMS suite. Consistent and connected digital experiences at each touchpoint are achievable when your content creation is quick and composable. With Edge Delivery Services, AEM enables a rapid development environment where authors can update and publish quickly, and new sites are launched rapidly. It allows improved conversion, reduces costs, and provides extreme content velocity. Components like decoupled content sources for authoring efficiency, built-in experimentation framework for test creation, and continuous monitoring through real-use monitoring (RUM) offer the flexibility that your brand needs to achieve exceptional digital experiences.
5. AEM Headless
AEM Headless CMS is a composable content management system that is designed and built explicitly as a content repository that makes content accessible via an API, for display on any device. It allows structured content (Content Fragments) in AEM to be consumed by any app over HTTP using GraphQL. Headless implementations enable the delivery of digital experiences across platforms and channels at scale.
6. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud Service
The advent of Adobe Experience Manager as an enterprise-grade cloud service simplified scalability and upgrades, providing access to the latest features and advanced cloud security. With seamless on-cloud updates, your teams, regardless of geographic location, can always have access to the latest features, tools, and functionalities for any project in a secured environment. AEM Adobe tool helps you create, innovate, and publish content and assets for sites, and apps with the quickest auto-scalability.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Features that Can Transform Your Digital Experiences
In the ever-evolving landscape of online businesses, Adobe Experience Manager is vested with the power to transform the digital experiences for your brand.
1. Project Dashboard
AEM’s project dashboard is a sleek and centralized dashboard, providing an at-a-glance view of all projects in a single place. It has a high- and granular-level view of projects to present the development, progress, and requirements of various projects based on specific performance metrics. Projects, known as resource groups, are represented as a tile on the dashboard for quick and easy access. Additionally, it allows users to add information to specific projects and enables them to add project information, tasks, digital assets, or external links to it.
2. Cloud Service & Secured Environment
The advent of Adobe Experience Manager as an enterprise-grade cloud service simplified scalability and upgrades, providing access to the latest features and advanced cloud security. With seamless on-cloud updates, your teams, regardless of geographic location, can always have access to the latest features, tools, and functionalities for any project in a secured environment.
3. ‘Out-of-the-Box’ Technology
‘Out-of-the-box’ technology makes Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) an easy-to-use plug-and-play platform that comes with pre-designed building blocks, templates, responsive layouts, and components to use directly without any coding. In case needed, the ‘What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)’ easy coding interface enables simple editors to code for your requirements. It makes AEM a preferred solution to create immersive experiences without much technical hassles and keeps all the teams updated with the latest developments in the core components.
4. Visual Media Conversion
Different channels have different sizes, formats, and AV quality for visual media, so it would be time-consuming if you resize them for each channel. Thanks to the Adobe Experience Manager Platform, it brings the ‘Visual Media Conversion’ feature for image and video bulk resizing in just a few clicks for the right media size required by the channels. Visual media conversion is freed from the limitations of sizing and formatting, which saves time and resources.
5. Omnichannel Content Delivery
Adobe Experience Manager adds new dimensions to the user experience with its omnichannel content delivery capability. It simultaneously facilitates the same content delivery to various channels, even on mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, to keep the experience consistent and connected across various touch points. It also enables managing multiple websites of different geographic locations and languages in the omnichannel digital realm.
Top Benefits of Adobe Experience Site Manager
Source : Intro to Adobe Experience Manager
- Easy Integration:
Designed for easy integration with other third-party tools and applications to work harmoniously applications on the same platform.
- Easy-to-Use CMS:
Without specific training or technical expertise, one can easily manage content and media for any website and other properties.
- Automated Workflows:
Streamline and automate rule-based tasks, processes, and workflows to keep the website functional with minimal or zero human intervention. Its built-in AI feature allows quickly tagging, cropping, and distributing assets.
- Add-On Functionality:
Enhance functionality when needed or when you wish to add specific functionality, then use ‘Add-on’ through third parties or from the Magento marketplace.
- Flexibility & Scalability:
AEM is one of the flexible and scalable content management solutions that enables you to enhance overall engagement with limitless possibilities of different content variations.
- Personalized Content
Enhance the experience with easy-to-create personalized content variations for different channels based on customer demands with the use of AI and data analysis.
- Easy Digital Assets Management
Adobe Experience Manager simplifies content management by placing them in a single place for easy and quick search.
- Targeted Customers Approach
Leverage its ability to approach the target customers and enhance engagement irrespective of the customer touch point.
- Better Task Management
AEM plays a pivotal role in managing and streamlining digital asset management; just add tasks for respective projects to simplify backend operations.
- SEO and User Experiences
AEM automatically generates metadata and tags for the respective content of assets for all locations. If these auto-generated metadata are not relatable, you can easily edit them. Such keyword-rich metadata helps search engines connect with users based on relevant content and improve user experience.
- Headless CMS
It allows marketers to create content independently for various platforms such as desktop, mobile, IoT, and more, whereas developers can focus on code building and shipping.
Adobe Experience Manager CMS: What Makes AEM the Preferred CMS Tool for Enterprise Users
Source: The Forrester Wave™: Content Management Systems, Q3 2023 report
Let’s discuss why choose AEM over other CMS for your brandAdobe Experience Manager CMS (Content management system) is the right CMS tool for your digital business, enabling omnichannel experience across channels. It allows marketers and developers to create, design, manage, optimize, and deliver content across various channels and touchpoints for an immersive experience with personalization at scale.
As AEM CMS:
- Follows UI approach for structured, unstructured, and long-form content
- Introduces new practitioner tools: UI-based A/B testing, Mapping Content to future product catalogs in commerce systems, Workflow Extensions into adjacent systems
- Integrates and breaks down silos between teams and stakeholders
According to ‘The Forrester Wave™: Content Management Systems, Q3 2023 report’, Adobe Experience Manager CMS has the vision for headless innovation and scalable personalization to lead the CMS world. Its capabilities of native integrations across digital suites, a broader partner ecosystem, and regular mergers, acquisitions, and innovations make it a leading CMS tool for digital commerce. Adobe Experience Manager Sites services are seamless and omnipresent, with its massive partner network available for businesses of any size.
Here, we have reasons that make Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) the preferred CMS tool for enterprise users.
- Robust Content Management – AEM provides powerful tools for managing complex content structures, enabling enterprises to efficiently organize and publish large volumes of content across various digital channels.
- Scalability – AEM is highly scalable and capable of handling the demands of large enterprises with ease. It can accommodate growing content repositories and increasing traffic without compromising performance.
- Integration Capabilities – AEM seamlessly integrates with other Adobe products, such as Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign, as well as third-party systems, allowing enterprises to create comprehensive digital experiences.
- Personalization – AEM offers advanced personalization features, leveraging data and analytics to deliver tailored content to different audience segments, enhancing user engagement and conversion rates.
- Multichannel Delivery – AEM empowers businesses to deliver content on multiple channels, including websites, mobile devices, social media, and IoT devices, ensuring a consistent and cohesive brand experience.
- Workflow Management – AEM’s robust workflow capabilities enable enterprises to streamline content creation, review, and approval processes, improving team collaboration and productivity.
- Extensibility – AEM’s architecture supports customizations and extensions, allowing enterprises to seamlessly adapt the platform to their specific requirements and integrate with existing systems.
- Security and Compliance – AEM prioritizes security standards and regulatory compliance by offering exclusive features like role-based access control, secured encryption, and compliance with industry standards and regulations, making it suitable for enterprise-level deployments.
- Cloud-Native Approach – AEM’s cloud-native architecture enables easy deployment, scalability, and flexibility for enterprises. It provides the agility required for enterprises to adapt to transforming business needs and changing market trends.
- Support and Community – Adobe provides extensive support and a vibrant community of users and developers, offering resources, documentation, training, and forums to help enterprises maximize the value of AEM.
With these capabilities, Adobe Experience Manager is a unique platform that designs and manages sites, applications, intranets, and extranets for your business, making it known as the right CMS tool for your business.
AEM with Other Adobe Cloud Tools: The Integration Scales Experiences
Source : Seamless Integration of Experience Manager Assets with Applications
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a power-packed platform that comes with a lot of built-in exclusive features to be used ‘Out of the box.’ Nevertheless, businesses, especially large enterprises, can integrate it with Adobe Creative Cloud to get more value and innovative content ideas or variations to multifold the experience. It enables bulk processing of assets with native tools like Lightroom Presets, Image Masks, and more, as well as breaking down the silos among teams and management.
1. Adobe AEM Integration with Adobe Commerce to Drive Revenue & Conversions
Adobe Commerce Cloud and Magento have seamless compatibility with Adobe Experience Manager, so the seamless integration between Adobe CMS (AEM) and Adobe Commerce empowers merchants. AEM and Adobe Commerce are highly compatible, so in any headless commerce project, AEM as the front end and Adobe Commerce as the back end are the finest combinations for crafting a seamless omnichannel experience. Marketers get the opportunity to innovate in their marketing campaigns with built-in product carousels, product teasers, page builders, and more.
2. Adobe AEM and Adobe Analytics Integration for Omnichannel Marketing
Adobe AEM and Adobe Analytics come with a seamless integration, crafting a strategy for omnichannel marketing that delivers a consistent experience across touchpoints and channels. This combination is a wonderful content marketing tool for businesses that uses customer insights to design marketing campaigns according to evolving trends, customer behaviors, and site performance.
3. Adobe AEM Integration with Adobe Sensei to Deliver Customized Solutions at Scale
Adobe Sensei and Adobe AEM bring artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that help create real-time user profiles, personalized experiences to meet the target audience’s demands, and enhanced engagement. AEM’s DAM (digital asset management) also helps marketers quickly access digital assets to manage the expectations of different audiences and channels.
Adobe Experience Manager CMS: How AEM Matches Against Popular CMS Characteristics
| CMS Characteristics | Adobe Experience Manager CMS |
| Intuitive Admin Dashboard | AEM’s admin dashboard helps you create, distribute, and manage all digital content and assets. Users can create, manage, optimize, and track multimedia web pages and blogs from a single dashboard. |
| User and Role-Based Administration | The role-based accessibility feature makes AEM a secured CMS, allowing users to access assets relevant to their jobs or those to which they are entitled. |
| Flexibility, Scalability, and Performance | AEM CMS is flexible and scalable for businesses of all sizes and can be expanded as your business grows. It is agile enough to manage traffic surges and occasional demands of your business or industry. |
| Personalization and Analytics | AEM has the native integrations of Adobe Analytics and Target to give you customer insights for creating personalized experiences across channels, touchpoints, and devices. |
| Content and Commerce Integration | AEM with Adobe Sensei integration helps you create personalized content and multiple product pages daily for your target audience at scale. It also empowers brands to publish the right content at the right time to the right audience with live search and product recommendations. |
| Built-in SEO Tools | AEM’s built-in SEO tools enable URL customization for different search engines and build an XML sitemap to understand website structure. They also help you improve security by using sling selectors to cache pages on the dispatcher, localize page names for the local region, and add canonical URL tags to help search engines. |
| Robust Integrations | AEM CMS easily integrates with other native cloud platforms, such as AEM Cloud tools, as well as many third-party platforms, such as Google Search Console, Social media, Google Analytics, CRM, and more. |
| Multilingual Content Capabilities | Its multilingual editing tools and workflows empower businesses to address international multilingual audiences in one go. |
| Detailed Analytics | Gives detailed analytics of web page activities from any digital touchpoint of the customer journey and creates reports to analyze and update content accordingly. |
| Built-in Content Staging | Easily stage and preview content before making changes to your live site. This is a quick test to gauge visitor experiences before you go live. |
| Pre-Built Templates | It offers basic pre-built templates (static and editable) for page creation, content fragments, and more. |
| Security Protocols | With AEM CMS, all the contents are protected during upload via HTTP TLS v1.2 or higher and remain private and protected until published by the author. It complies with LDAP, SAML, and SSO systems to ensure page security. |
| Extensive Support | Adobe community is always there to support and help you with freely available product documentation and digital guides with the Adobe support team for quick resolutions. |
What are the Roles and Responsibilities of Adobe Experience Manager Developer?
A perfectly balanced AEM Experience Manager Sites development team should have nine people with the right skill sets and experiences. The team contains each resource, including the Project Manager, Scrum Master, Product Owner, IT Lead, Strategists, QA/UAT Lead, Technical Architect, Back-end Developer, and Front-end Developer. So, the brief Adobe Experience manager job descriptions for a Back-end developer and a Front-end developer are as follows:
The back-end Developer and Front-end Developer are involved in the ‘design, development, and QA/UAT’ stages of any Adobe Experience Manager Development. These are the key roles and responsibilities of an Adobe Experience Manager developer.
- Conceptualizing and implementing enterprise CMS solution
- Client requirements analysis and implementation concepts creation
- Development of Java-based release-capable AEM software components
- Supplied web frontend HTML templates in AEM JSP templates implementation
- Assist and support product owner in requirements assessment in Adobe Experience Manager architecture, technologies, and internal interfaces or connections to third-party systems
- Ensure seamless AEM transfer into the development and operating environment of EPD (AEM architecture and staging)
- Native Adobe Marketing Cloud tools (Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, or Adobe Tag Manager) integration with AEM
Understanding the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Pricing
Adobe Experience Manager is a robust platform for digital asset management and comprehensive content management for digital businesses worldwide. The cost of an AEM platform is influenced by a multitude of factors, including features and modules you would like to get for your sites. AEM comes with multiple features, as shown here.
| Editable templates | GraphQL API |
| Intuitive WISYWIG interface | Events and webhooks |
| Style system | Adobe IP-enabled code testing and deployment (CI/CD) |
| Multi-site manager | SDKs and CLIs |
| Core components | Rules-based authoring |
| Style systems | Integrated with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target* |
| Translation workflows | Automated product updates |
| Experience audit | Adobe-managed capacity elasticity and auto-scale |
| Intuitive headless visual editor | 24/7 monitoring, event response, and disaster recovery |
| Unstructured content with layout | Default CDN optimized for Adobe Experience Manager |
| Preview content | Application-level SLA |
| Structured content | Security certifications: ISO-27001, SOC-2 |
Additionally, Adobe Experience Manager comes with various add-ons too.
| Commerce Integration Framework |
| B2C and B2B commerce additions |
| Runtime for Adobe Commerce |
| Commerce components |
| Commerce integration framework |
| Adobe Learning Manager |
| Employee and customer training additions. |
| Fluidic player for all content formats |
| OOTB Sites learning components |
| Gamification and social learning |
| Adobe Experience Manager Screens |
| Adobe Experience Manager Screens |
| Content scheduling and device management |
| Design and layout management |
| Data/Event triggers for rules-based personalization |
| Adobe Developer App Builder |
| Additions for custom apps. |
| Spectrum UI Framework |
| Custom events |
| Runtime |
| Enhanced security |
| Additions to help meet industry-specific regulations. |
| HIPAA ready |
| FedRAMP moderate |
| GLBA ready |
| Adobe Experience Manager Guides |
| Component content management system. |
| Intuitive DITA authoring tools |
| Structured content management |
| AI-powered documentation |
The basic plan for the Adobe Experience Manager CMS platform starts from $100,000 per license. There is no trial version available, as AEM is an enterprise-grade platform with all-encompassing tools to garner exceptional digital experiences. However, the pricing for various modules varies based on attributes, features, and customizations. In order to get customized pricing, get in touch with an Adobe Experience Cloud Partner with a detailed understanding of all your queries.
Final Words
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an intelligence suite that combines capabilities of digital asset management and content management for enterprises. In order to create, manage, and deliver rich-media assets on your websites, Adobe Experience Manager Sites services from a leading Adobe Experience Cloud Partner like Krish help you respond to complex business needs. Our team of skilled Adobe AEM developers brings expertise for AEM web development and AEM as a cloud service to navigate your development challenges and leap into your digital dreams. You can reach out to us for all your concerns related to Adobe Experience Manager Sites services, and we would love to help you.
Table of Content
- What is Adobe Experience Manager? Everything You Need to Know About AEM
- What is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?
- How Does Adobe Experience Manager Work?
- What are the 6 Modules of Adobe Experience Manager CMS?
- 1. Adobe AEM Sites
- 2. Digital Asset Management (DAM)
- 3. AEM Digital Enrollment & Forms
- 4. AEM Edge Delivery Services
- 5. AEM Headless
- 6. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud Service
- Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Features that Can Transform Your Digital Experiences
- 1. Project Dashboard
- 2. Cloud Service & Secured Environment
- 3. ‘Out-of-the-Box’ Technology
- 4. Visual Media Conversion
- 5. Omnichannel Content Delivery
- Top Benefits of Adobe Experience Site Manager
- Adobe Experience Manager CMS: What Makes AEM the Preferred CMS Tool for Enterprise Users
- AEM with Other Adobe Cloud Tools: The Integration Scales Experiences
- Adobe Experience Manager CMS: How AEM Matches Against Popular CMS Characteristics
- What are the Roles and Responsibilities of Adobe Experience Manager Developer?
- Understanding the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Pricing
- Final Words
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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
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Choosing the Right Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Partner (Featuring 5 Top Tips)
22 July, 2024 Establishing any business has become a task because of the intense competition in the marketplace. Imagine the need to get noticed and compelling customers to make a purchase amidst every brand doing the same. That’s why it becomes imperative to choose the right tools that can elevate your business experience. Adobe Experience Manager is one such powerful tool that can uplift your business and yield maximum conversions.
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