Unveiling the New Adobe Experience Manager

Cloud, Content and Personalization Enhancements in Advance Customer Experience Management (CXM) for Marketers & IT.

In the age of the empowered consumer, the struggle for companies to manage experiences that are personalized and ever-changing in response to the context and preferences derived from data-driven insights is complex.

Digital is also disrupting consumer behavior at an accelerating pace. In fact, in our annual consumer content survey we just released, the number of millennials with four or more devices increased by 130% year over year. And among the 3.75 billion Internet users worldwide in 2019, 86.2% will use a mobile phone to go online. Our question of “what channel?” has morphed from a simple question to a statement declaring the futility of thinking channel-centric. Digital is now naturally omnipresent – like the air we breathe. The study’s findings on personalization is also telling. Consumers have come to expect more than personalization from brands; they require companies to navigate the fine edge between being relevant and not creepy to win their loyalty. Consumers demand that brand’s digital experiences have the EQ of the most socially evolved humans.

That’s because consumers value and buy experiences, and content is the soul that powers these experiences. It is why at Adobe, we continue to think and innovate deeply in the area of content and the data insights that empower organizations to synthesize, scale, deliver and optimize valuable experiences. Adobe Experience Manager is the key solution for this; precisely why we are the industry leader in digital experience management for web content management, digital asset management and customer communications. Experience Manager has helped companies speed up asset creation by 47%, has driven an average 20% increase in team productivity and increased revenue through improved digital experiences year after year (source: IDC, The Business Value of Adobe Experience Manager Sites, February 2018).

Today, I’m excited to announce the latest version of Experience Manager and share some of the innovations that will help brands continue to lead in Customer Experience Management (CXM) and differentiate on the experiences they deliver to their customers. Experience Manager 6.5 further enhances the ability for marketers, IT and developers to work smarter and faster. New innovations powered by Adobe Sensei helps users to intelligently personalize every touchpoint along the journey. Additionally, we continue to extend Experience Manager’s capabilities for mid-size organizations, so companies of all sizes can better compete and win customer loyalty at the scale of enterprise.

Let’s take a closer look at the innovations that address the challenges organizations of all sizes have in transforming the digital customer experience:

Content velocity

To keep pace with increased expectations to deliver personalized customer experiences, brands must streamline and speed up content creation and optimize videos for any channel.

• With Adobe Asset Link generally available, creative users can find, edit and reuse digital assets that reside in Experience Manager Assets directly within Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC.
• A new high-speed asset transfer in Experience Manager Assets’ brand portal accelerates asset sourcing and two-way distribution, with a faster, more flexible way for marketing teams to manage assets with colleagues globally.
• Interactive Communications in Experience Manager Forms enable authors to quickly author and personalize multichannel customer communications at 1:1 scale.

Fluid experiences

Our unique combination of profile data and content helps brands manage and develop experiences with agility across owned, earned and paid end-points.

• Adobe’s new Single-Page Application (SPA) Editor in Experience Manager Sites enables developers and marketers to preview, edit, and manage content in-context and in one place for faster collaboration.

• A new HTTP REST API for Content Fragment delivery in Experience Manager Sites provides developers more support for headless content delivery.
• Advancements to Experience Manager digital signage extends marketers’ ability to design, deliver and optimize experiences on digital displays in physical venues, such as in-store screens or kiosks. This includes support for massive scale signage networks, and powerful publishing and approval workflows to speed up delivery and consistency of in-store campaigns. Integration with Adobe Analytics makes it easy to optimize experiences by dynamically personalizing signage content.
• Advanced charting functionality, simplified data integrations and authoring usability improvements in Experience Manager Forms enables organizations to embed interactive content in welcome kits, letters and statements to create customer communications across channels faster than ever before. Deeper integration with Adobe Sign Cloud Signatures, part of Adobe Document Cloud, now empowers customers to digitally sign documents, while meeting regulatory requirements.

Experience intelligence

It’s never been easier to manage and discover the right assets and deliver engaging experiences with digital signage thanks to Adobe Sensei and Adobe Experience Platform.

• Visual Search, powered by Adobe Sensei, helps marketers using Experience Manager Assets find similar images to a specific asset in a matter of seconds.
• Experience Manager Assets’ Smart Tags now extends to video, using Adobe Sensei to automate the process of video discovery with intelligent tags that correspond to actions, attributes and objects in videos.
• Smart Crop for video, powered by Adobe Sensei, automatically identifies and crops the most important parts of a video in Experience Manager Assets to ensure a great video experience for users no matter which direction they hold their phones.

• Automated Forms Conversion accelerates digitization and modernization of data capture experience through automated conversion of legacy print forms to device friendly and responsive Adaptive Forms in Experience Manager Forms.

Cloud agility

The cloud is all about agility and innovation, enabling brands and their IT teams to support dynamic business and marketing needs.

• Autoscaling keeps IT on top of their game by automatically adding capacity during high user traffic, ensuring the end user experience is not impacted by operational limitations.
• Quality gate enhancements expedite time to market and reduce risks by implementing engineering best practices to test and launch custom code.
• Frictionless Upgrades will reduce time and complexity of upgrades, providing teams access to the newest Experience Manager features even quicker and with minimal downtime.

I appreciate the continued partnership of brands I greatly admire for the trust they have placed in the Adobe team and Experience Manager to be a cornerstone of their digital transformation strategies. We wouldn’t be able to do this without the support of our long-standing and growing ecosystem of agencies, technology and system integrator partners. There are many here at Adobe who have worked incredibly hard on this latest release and will continue to so because we are here for the long-run, with you.

I encourage you to explore the new capabilities available in Experience Manager 6.5 here and to engage with us at our upcoming Adobe Summit in Las Vegas and London, and Symposia across the world. You can also register for a webinar to learn more about what’s new here.