Adobe Unveils the Next Generation of Adobe Experience Manager to Power Digital Experiences
We are just a few days away from Adobe Summit, the leading industry conference that paves the way for brands to transform into experience-led businesses. At this year’s Summit, we will be sharing some of the exciting new innovations in the next generation of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), the digital-experience management and delivery solution within Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC).
Over the past couple of years, we have seen a rapid growth in consumer appetite for rich experiences — not only with smartphones and tablets, but also a slew of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Brands that have made AEM part of their digital foundations for transformation have new demands that extend well beyond websites and mobile apps.
Companies are grappling with the ways in which immense quantities of data and content come together to disrupt not only how marketing is done, but also how digital impacts the entire product/service experience. New opportunities for personalization and value-add are turning the traditional customer journey on its head. Two years ago, I spoke about how mobile apps are “…becoming the remote control to the Internet of Things.” While this is truer today than ever before, products, brick-and-mortar locations, and the ways in which people interact are all becoming a meld of the digital and physical worlds. While augmented reality is an obvious example of how this is happening, this trend is manifesting itself in more subtle and universal ways.
Fluid Experiences Power the Connected Customer Journey.
All of this requires content — a lot of it. And, not just any content, but the kind of content that is engaging and surfaces exactly when someone needs it or wants it — regardless of the device he or she is using. It’s something you and I do effortlessly when we have conversations that span email, text, face-to-face, and phone.
One of the overarching principles that has guided this latest release of AEM is that content is the fuel of digital experiences. When combined with data insights and intelligence, content provides the bedrock of what companies need to compete based on customer experience, which is why it’s critical to offer capabilities that allow brands to:
- Source the best content;
- Manage content in an omnichannel way; and
- Enable content to quickly flow to all the content-hungry connections across more traditional touchpoints as well as new ones.
On our continued journey to realize this vision, AEM 6.3 now allows companies to deliver compelling digital experiences beyond owned to affiliated properties — web, mobile, IoT — at incredible scale. In this latest release, we introduce new capabilities that enable users to realize the vision of what we call ‘fluid experiences’ — content that flows and adapts to its context with the help of Adobe Sensei, our artificial-intelligence (AI) and machine-learning framework. The experience fragments and content-services features extend AEM to power not only web and mobile experiences, but also well-structured touchpoints like ATMs and Pinterest as well as emerging, less-structured mobile app and IoT experiences.
Accelerate Content Velocity and Digital-Experience (DX) Foundation Setup.
Since our acquisition of Livefyre last year, we’ve made significant strides when it comes to integrating AEM Livefyre with the rest of the AEM platform. We’re enabling AEM Assets to source and obtain permission for user-generated content (UGC) from within the interface of AEM Assets. This — combined with continued improvements in the integration of Adobe Creative Cloud — drives greater content velocity.
Finally, we want you to be able to take advantage of these innovations, so we are accelerating your ability to get the foundational elements of your digital-experience strategy — websites, digital-asset management, forms — set up quickly with more production-ready components, user-experience (UX) best practices, and tools to help you connect digital experiences to data in your enterprise systems like customer relationship management (CRM).
I invite you to explore all the new and improved changes we’ve made — these videos showcase some of the new features you’ll find in AEM 6.3.
Digital Transformation Requires More Than Technology.
While we continue to be cited as a leader in this market and receive recognition from industry analysts, the ultimate measure of our success is the success of the brands and partners that choose to continue being part of the journey with Adobe. So, in addition to the cutting-edge technology we provide, we have been investing greatly in the customer community and the resources you have to lead your organization through change using AEM:
- One of the largest tracks we offer at Adobe Summit NA and EMEA is dedicated to customer experience.
- Adobe Experience Manager Exchange at Summit — The largest in-person, community-led event takes place the day before Adobe Summit and features speakers from MasterCard, Adidas, and Biogen at this year’s North America Summit. Prior to the EMEA Summit in London, the Adobe Experience Manager Exchange will be hosted by Adobe customer, Shell.
- Pre-Conference Training — Adobe provides training on AEM as well as the rest of the AMC.
- EXPE Awards — The first annual NA Experience Excellence (EXPE) awards will recognize and honor the innovations and successes of our customers across five categories using AEM.
- The Experience Insider — Check out our Adobe Experience Manager Newsletter for AEM business users.
- IMMERSE 2017 — This year’s global virtual developer conference takes place from May 15– 19.
- On-Demand and Instructor-Led Training — Check out our course catalog to get started!
- Adobe Experience Manager Help — Visit the AEM support community for solutions to common issues.
- Adobe Partners — Collaborate with our incredible ecosystem of partners that will help you solve challenges unique to your business and stand out from the competition.
The path to the digital transformation of the customer experience is exciting — but it can also be incredibly challenging, as it requires an approach that combines creativity, marketing expertise, and technological skills and often requires collaboration across functional groups. Don’t go it alone.
Here’s to the amazing things we’ll achieve in 2017!