Introducing Your New DAM Powered by Adobe Sensei

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According to Adobe’s 2018 Consumer Content Survey, consumers need personalized content more than ever before and on a seemingly endless array of emerging devices and formats. What’s more, 55 percent of consumers are engaging with digital content simultaneously across various devices.

Consumers’ insatiable appetite for content has driven leading brands to fill demand by creating content at a fast and furious pace. For some, this means pumping out hundreds or even thousands of digital assets daily that need to be edited, uploaded, tagged, managed, cropped, assembled, and personalized for many channels and experiences.

Introducing AEM Assets 6.4

Currently, each step of the content production lifecycle takes a considerable amount of time and manual effort, which is a big challenge for marketers. We understand this content velocity challenge and have set out to support marketers by introducing new tools in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) 6.4, powered by Adobe Sensei, to speed up the content production process.

This includes a more automated, insightful, and mission-critical enterprise digital asset management platform (DAM) to help customers manage digital assets for today’s experiences and lean forward to rapidly deliver the rich media experiences of tomorrow. DAM has become a critical foundational element to connect the content production process to digital experiences.

In AEM Assets 6.4, we focused on helping customers solve a few important challenges for DAM:

Here are a few of the exciting highlights from AEM Assets 6.4.

Create Content at Scale with Native Support for Adobe Creative Cloud

We’re making it even easier for Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise users to access and reuse digital assets with a native connector built exclusively for AEM. The connector gives Creative Cloud users a single place to search for shared assets across their organization’s DAM and use them directly within Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign CC, without ever leaving the Creative Cloud interface. With this integration, organizations will be better able to scale the creation of new content with a seamless workflow for creatives and marketers. We’ll be rolling out availability to customers throughout 2018.

We’re also uncovering new patterns of collaboration among creative and marketing users with emerging media. Customers are no longer satisfied with simple image and video experiences, and leading brands are using emerging media formats such as 3D to create the engaging experiences consumers crave.

Manufacturing, retail, and automotive industries have been using 3D models for some time, but those digital assets were limited to design, prototyping, planning, and product development. Brands can now go a step further with 3D and reuse models they’ve built in Adobe Dimension CC in AEM to create a wide variety of experiences from new product banners to interactive 3D experiences for mobile and desktop. The possibilities are endless. In addition to 3D, the AEM 6.4 release also contains new viewers for virtual reality (VR) and panoramic experiences.

Find What’s Hidden with Smarter Asset Management

Finding assets quickly in the corporate DAM can be a big challenge for marketers. In order to quickly find an asset, the content must be tagged with the appropriate keywords and metadata to appear in search results. This is a painfully tedious process that is typically done manually within organizations.

In the AEM Assets 6.4 release, we’re significantly enhancing Smart Tags to help marketers discover relevant images in an instant. Using a self-learning algorithm powered by Adobe Sensei, the machine recognizes images and populates tags based on a brand’s unique business taxonomy. As the algorithm continues to learn, Smart Tags identifies and suggests unique tags and automatically populates images with tags as new assets are introduced into the DAM.

In addition to Smart Tags, we also added more tools to help DAM admins automatically import, export, curate, extract, manage, administer, and govern metadata for large repositories of digital assets. We also added new tools for building reports, designing workflows, and publishing content to the Brand Portal.

Deliver Automated and Fluid Experiences with Smart Crop

In AEM 6.4, we’ve made the Dynamic Media capabilities within AEM Assets smarter, enabling marketers to automate common content assembly and delivery tasks in bulk, and bring experiences to market faster than ever.

Smart Crop, powered by Adobe Sensei, automatically detects and crops the focal point in any image, capturing the intended point-of-interest, regardless of screen size. This helps compress workflows and eliminates hours of tedious work. Within Smart Crop, marketers can automatically locate and generate high-quality swatches from product imagery that shows color or texture, saving countless hours in the process of getting new content on the website.

Smart Crop also detects the available bandwidth and device type the consumer is using and optimizes image delivery to dramatically minimize image file size by up to 70 percent. Images are delivered with no loss of visual fidelity, ensuring smooth, quick loading experiences that drive conversion.

Scale Content Operations in the Cloud

We’re introducing more capabilities over the cloud offering at a rapid pace. This is especially true in the Brand Portal, which receives regular quarterly product updates to help marketers distribute assets to external teams and partners. This zero-code environment allows you to get up and running quickly, and easily configure the DAM to share content with external teams and partners. The AEM 6.4 enhancements for the Brand Portal include UX and performance improvements along with asset reports, improved link sharing with license agreements, and a much-anticipated access request workflow for new Brand Portal users. We will be continuously updating the Brand Portal with additional capabilities throughout 2018.

We’ve also made it more seamless for IT and operations teams to manage, configure, and push customizations to the DAM with an all new, self-service interface Cloud Manager. The Cloud Manager interface accelerates AEM customization, such as altering the user interface or adding a new functionality to a custom media portal. As a result, platform updates are now deployed to a managed cloud with state-of-the-art continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. This means customizations are available to DAM users in a matter of hours and days, versus weeks or months.

AEM Assets 6.4 is an incredibly exciting release for us and we hope you feel the same way. We’re continuing this story at Adobe Summit in March, so if you’re attending, check out the AEM sessions in the Content and Experience Management track to learn more.