Latest Adobe Experience Manager Sites Leads Innovations in Fluid Experiences and Content Intelligence
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At Adobe we’re committed to helping customers deliver the very best of Experience Business. Only Adobe gives everyone — from emerging artists to global brands — everything needed to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. For brands it has become critical to deliver contextual and personalized content, across every touch point. According to Adobe’s 2018 Consumer Content Survey, two-thirds of consumers won’t purchase from a brand if they receive out of context or poorly designed experience from a brand.
Adobe Experience Manager Sites sits at the heart of this, enabling organizations to create and manage digital experiences at scale across all channels. We empower digital marketers to focus on creating experiences independent of the screen or channel on which it will ultimately be rendered. Experience Manager 6.4 is our most advanced release that furthers our mission of helping brands lay the best digital foundation, while tackling many of the complexities of the omnichannel business. The below details the main drivers of Experience Manager Sites 6.4 innovations.
Cloud Scale and Security
Experience Manager Sites is one of the most scalable and secure cloud solutions on the market. This year we’re making it even more simple for customers to manage their cloud applications with the release of Cloud Manager – self-service portal for IT teams and implementation partners. With Cloud Manager, teams benefit from step-by-step guidance and best practices to facilitate optimal configuration and manage their Experience Manager environment throughout the lifecycle. They can leverage:
- Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery of code to speed time to market for deployment
- Code Inspection, testing and security validation based on best practices to minimize disruptions
- A self-service portal to setup, manage and monitor managed cloud environment
- Flexibly schedule deployment that works for your business processes
As majority of our customers move to cloud, Cloud Manager is an important application to provide a pulse on their most important investments, prevent disruptions via guided management and maintain high agility.
Fluid Experiences
Experience Manager Sites has always been at the forefront of enabling marketing and IT teams to create content and experiences and deliver it across any channel – regardless of if they’re managed by Experience Manager. This hybrid experience management makes Experience Manager an ideal application for use across any size of business facing a variety of demands from their content management system. With fluid experiences, brands can optimally deliver experiences across a wide range of touch points and formats. Our latest innovations for fluid experiences include:
Fluid Experiences optimally deliver experiences across a wide range of touchpoints and formats
- Single Page Editor: Front-end developers using single-page applications (SPA) JavaScript frameworks, to build customized experiences, face collaboration challenges with experience designers due to limited in-context experience preview and edit capabilities. With SPA Editor, front-end developers can make experiences editable in Experience Manager with minimal annotations to their code. We’re starting with the React framework, and plan to expand to other front-end frameworks, so developers and authors can collaborate faster for their custom SPA experience.
- Content Services: By providing a ‘zero-code’ environment, we’re helping brands deliver rapidly adaptable experiences. Marketers can now easily manage content and experiences for web properties (e.g. website, partner site, portals) and enable developers to access content as a service for their custom applications (e.g. mobile apps, progressive web apps). With enhancements to Content Services, content and experience authoring teams can use our in-context WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to author content models for any headless end-point (e.g. mobile apps, smart watch apps), radically simplifying the way marketers and developers collaborate to manage experiences. Marketers can view the content that is being served as a service and collaborate in real-time to make changes.
- Content Fragments: Updates to Content Fragments give content authors the ability to lock written text content (e.g. legal disclosures) that can then be re-used on any web page. Authors can easily create variations associated with the master Content Fragment. For example, authors can create a goal-based shortened variation that could be a teaser of a long form article, while maintaining the context and integrity of the article. This is powered by Adobe Sensei, our Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning framework.
- Experience Fragments: With enhanced Experience Fragments, marketers easily manage contextually optimized experiences that can be re-used across various end-points. Experience Fragments can be syndicated as fully formed experiences to end-points that can consume html e.g. mobile app, Pinterest, Facebook. Since Experience Manager supports hybrid delivery, these Experience Fragments can also be accessed as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) for headless consumption. This offers brands full flexibility to manage omnichannel experiences. In addition, brands can personalize experiences across every screen and surface at scale with fluid personalization by integrating Experience Fragments into Adobe Target, the personalization engine of Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Content Intelligence
We’re focused on incorporating machine learning and AI to augment how content and experiences can be designed, managed, delivered and consumed. AI will bring radical agility and efficiencies to process vast amounts of data for better recommendations – saving time for marketers to do more with less.
Making decisions on how to most effectively layout a page, and in what order content should be placed to maximize results is time-consuming. With the introduction of Smart Layout, experience authors can rely on AI to compose best performing layouts for each customer segment and deliver hyper-personalization at scale.
Smart Layout leverages AI to first understand the content itself, then how the content has contributed to the projected goal and lastly optimize to visually fit layout options. This predictive model creates a range of layouts that ultimately stand the test as they are served and further refined. This means that two site visitors will engage with radically different layouts, personalized to their tastes. For instance, if two customers are making hotel reservations online, one may be an avid golfer, while the other responds well to spa, golf, and shopping offers. One customer would only see a golf offer above the fold, while the other customer will see spa, golf, and shopping offers, spaced equally above the fold. Using AI, brands can deliver the best converting layout to all customers.
With Smart Layout, marketers can automatically create & scale variations of page experiences based on audience engagement preferences
Time to Value
At Adobe, we’re laser-focused on helping brands increase marketing velocity and collaboration amongst teams. We recently introduced Core Components, which are production-ready open source components – building blocks of web pages – built on recommended best practice that can be used to speed up development of websites. We continuously expand the library of available Core Components, available on GitHub, and hear from customers that these components have lowered web implementation and go-live time. Developers new to Experience Manager can work within a tutorial environment to quickly get up to speed using best practices.
With the introduction of the Style System – system of record for overall brand design or style – authors can create visual variations of web components with zero back-end development.
Front-end developers can map styles guide implementations to template and components, and expose style variations to content authors on component level. Content authors can select styles in-context and create sophisticated layouts without the overhead of creating new templates or server-side components.
Experience Manager is also helping customers address new obligations for data governance and privacy design features to comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Learn what we are doing as your trusted data processor and partner on the shared compliance journey here.
Managing your multi-channel experiences is even more simple in Experience Manager 6.4. We look forward to hearing from you and learning about the ways you are planning to use our latest release. Schedule a demo to see it in action and attend Summit NA and EMEA.