Introducing Adobe Experience Manager Communities for Learning

As we kick off Adobe Summit EMEA today, we’re excited to announce a new SaaS offering for creating social communities, specifically designed around social learning and field/channel enablement, called Adobe Experience Manager Communities for learning. This follows closely on the heels of the announcement of the latest major version of Adobe Experience Manager at Adobe Summit in Salt Lake City, and speaks to our ongoing customer commitment to innovate on the solution.

While digital experiences delivered directly to customers are critical to building brand loyalty and engagement, interactions customers have with an enterprise’s employees and partners are just as important. This new Adobe Experience Manager offering provides a simple way for marketers and subject matter experts to publish educational content to a community, facilitate knowledge exchange, and measure results.

Employees Are Critical to Building Brand Affinity

Providing customer-facing employees and a company’s partners the content and knowledge they need to be effective is increasingly challenging as consumers come armed with information from digital channels and organizations move faster in their introduction of products and services. In addition, the use of mobile devices continues to rise, including for those working in the field, resulting in an ever-increasing demand for content that’s accessible across devices. Simply pushing out content one-way, without the ability to easily solicit feedback or contributions to the content from those consuming it, can result in poor quality. An agile approach is far more effective, where the audience is part of a learning community, and members not only consume content, but offer comments, insights, questions, and even their own content—so that knowledge is freely exchanged from peer-to-peer instantly.

At the core of any successful social community is an experience that entices users to continue coming back to interact and contribute their own insights. In doing so, the community continues to flourish and grow in value. A key component to enabling this is to ensure relevant content is easily surfaced to each individual. Experience Manager Communities for learning ensures the most relevant content is easily discovered by users, with dynamic content recommendations based on user profile information, tags and activities; a streamlined interface with featured, assigned, recommended, and viewed content; and search that dives into metadata.

****In addition, managing the content is critical so it’s organized effectively across teams. Experience Manager Communities for learning comes with embedded capabilities of Experience Manager Assets, so assets can easily be uploaded and managed from a central repository. The solution is also built on top of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, enabling integration with the Marketing Cloud Assets folder, so assets can be easily shared between other Marketing Cloud solutions.

Experience Manager Communities for learning is not “another social network for the enterprise”—social interactivity is enabled directly while viewing content, so users can immediately add questions, comments, ratings, tags, and other insights without going to another screen or joining a specific forum to do so. This streamlined method of interactivity makes it easy to share insights, encouraging knowledge sharing across peers and experts.

The solution can be accessed anywhere, and is built with mobile in mind as a first-class client. This isn’t only convenient, but critical for those in the field who need access to information at a moment’s notice. Available for iPad in its first release, the offering enables users to find and access content, complete courses, interact with others, and gain insights at the moment of need. Users can also download content for offline viewing and tracking, even when disconnected from the network.

Both formal and informal training can be supported—enabling users to store, categorize and publish content, including SCORM and xAPI (Tin Can) compliant eLearning content, for mandatory or optional consumption. Learner progress and scores can be tracked for certification, or integrated with a third-party system of record.

The solution goes beyond basic reporting of data that must be massaged to glean any insights—it provides rich analytics in graphical format across user engagement, content effectiveness, and top contributors within the community, to instantly identify trends, successes and problem areas that can be acted upon immediately.

Experience Manager Communities for learning is a turn-key solution enabling instant creation of communities to quickly drive ROI. It can be deployed as an on-demand, stand-alone offering, and leveraged immediately without any customization or development, or any prerequisite Adobe products sold separately. It can also be purchased to support a broader customer experience strategy, along with the rest of Experience Manager.

We’re working hard and expect to make the offering available this summer, so stay tuned for updates.