Introducing New Adobe Experience Manager: Innovations for Digital Experience
I’ve been sharing my thoughts for several years now on our annual release of Adobe Experience Manager. Today, we have almost quarterly releases to help brands stay ahead of the shifts in mobile and cloud, and the expectations impacting the way they need to connect with customers. Yet, our annual release still remains the most significant.
It offers us a chance to look across Adobe Experience Manager in its entirety and reflect on the tremendous work of the Adobe product team, as well as the people who champion and push digital transformations within companies invested in our digital experience management solution.
With that in mind, we’re excited to announce today at Adobe Summit the next major version of Adobe Experience Manager, which we expect to be available by the end of May 2015. It has significant advances that will continue to help organizations conquer complexity so they can deliver connected digital experiences across the customer journey from online to physical interactions.
Adobe Experience Manager Screens: Digital’s impact extends to physical experiences
Digital’s impact has moved well beyond websites now to connected experiences across web, mobile apps and IoT. The introduction of Adobe Experience Manager Screens is an exploration of ways to blend the value of physical stores with the personalization and visualization powers of digital.
Experience Manager Screens is different than the early use of digital signage to pump billboard-like ads into stores. First, because it is part of the Experience Manager platform, it’s able to easily connect context across the web, mobile apps and in-store or in-venue screens built with Adobe Experience Manager. Second, it’s interactive. Taken together, this unlocks the ability to touch consumers at home, on-the-go, in-store, and wherever digital content proliferates.
For example, let’s say you’re deciding on a car to purchase. You may start the journey at home on the web looking at makes and models and create a profile to explore options. Then, when you log into the brand’s mobile app, built on Experience Manager Apps, you locate the nearest dealership and let them know you’ll be arriving for a test drive. At the dealership, with a swipe of your finger on the mobile app you can transfer the content you’re looking at onto a large screen in the showroom, driven by Experience Manager Screens. This allows you to quickly share your context with the sales person and continue the buying process. This is just one example of many across industries that this new innovation makes possible for brands.
Beyond Adobe Experience Manager Screens, we’re delivering key innovations across Adobe Experience Manager to help enterprises in four key vectors:
- Building experiences for the web, mobile, and IoT world with a solution that is simple, yet powerful
- Unleashing creativity in digital experiences
- Speeding time-to-market with new cloud options
- Ending the debate on best-of-breed versus platform for personalization and analytics
Greater support for web, mobile and Internet of Things
The market and analysts have recognized our leading support for building mobile experiences with Adobe Experience Manager. We were one of the first to deliver a mobile touch-optimized UI for authoring these experiences. In this latest release, we’ve made bold steps in our support for mobile experiences.
- Responsive websites: Designing sites for all device sizes is now uniquely supported with our new responsive grid capability in Experience Manager Sites, which allows marketers and business users to easily create great responsive sites without a single line of code.
- Mobile apps: In 2015, no digital experience delivery platform or web content management system is worth consideration without a mobile app development solution as part of its offering. Last year, we announced Experience Manager Apps, Adobe’s leading mobile app development platform for building and managing content-rich and utility apps. Now we’re providing a single place, the Experience Manager Apps management dashboard, for marketers and developers to manage app assets, update content, and stage, test and view performance metrics.
- Mobile forms and documents: For industries with complex form and document requirements, Adobe Experience Manager ensures these experiences are available on-the-go. New support in Experience Manager Forms for adaptive documents enables the creation of responsive communications and statements, and enhancements to adaptive forms include responsive tables, reusable form fragment support, customizable errors and form sets.
Unleashing creativity in digital experiences
Anyone who has launched a content marketing effort recognizes one of the first hurdles is sourcing quality content that is relevant to your audience. Today, we’ve further refined the value Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud deliver to marketers.
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- Beyond sharing, unlocking the value of your digital assets: We’re making it easier to take creative assets and maximize their impact. With Experience Manager Sites, marketers can take Adobe Photoshop files and easily turn them into digital experience templates for online experiences. And in Experience Manager Assets, we’re introducing the capability to connect product information to Adobe InDesign templates in order to automatically generate custom catalogues for offline experiences. Read my colleague Elliot Sedegah’s post for the full rundown on all we’ve introduced today in the area of digital asset management.
- Shoppable Media: Any piece of content can be a commerce moment. Content drives the desire for commerce, and commerce should follow wherever content proliferates. Our innovation in Experience Manager Assets for shoppable media is a dynamic capability that empowers marketers to transform digital imagery into rich, interactive shopping experiences. With a few clicks (or taps), a marketer can now add multiple “hotspots” to any image.
- Adobe Creative Cloud companion desktop app: This tool for creative pros now opens up access within Adobe Creative Cloud to Experience Manager Assets, so creatives and marketers don’t have to work in content silos.
Faster time-to-market with greater cloud options
- New Adobe Experience Manager Sites managed services for basic offering: This new offering makes it more attractive for mid-size businesses to gain all the richness of Experience Manager Sites in a manner that suits their organization’s size and needs.
- Go faster with cloud: Adobe Experience Manager Assets now has a new on-demand (SaaS) option for companies that want to set up quickly with little customization to enable asset sharing and delivery within or outside the firewall.
Personalization and Analytics: Ending the debate on best-of-breed, platform and integrations
As the digital experiences brands need to deliver become richer and more personalized through data, there has been conversation as to whether organizations benefit most from a platform or the integration of best-of-breed technologies. To us, this is based on old assumptions and rules.
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In the new version of Adobe Experience Manager, we make it possible to have market-leading analytics and performance targeting capabilities from Adobe Marketing Cloud available within Experience Manager.
This ultimately gives companies the ability to select the analytics and personalization capabilities they need from Marketing Cloud or other solutions. However, when brands do combine best-of-breed solutions from Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics, we now provide a single product experience for digital experience delivery.
No longer do marketers need to settle for rudimentary analytics or personalization in order to avoid integration. Nor do marketers need to become system integrators to truly use best-of-breed solutions.
See you at Adobe Summit this week!
If you are at Adobe Summit this week, I invite you to visit our booth or attend one of the many sessions in the Digital Experience Management track or hands-on labs. Please also join us for our Adobe Experience Manager launch party on March 10. You can register here.