For several years now Adobe Experience Manager has been dealing with these challenges. At spring release its creators identified 4 key factors that are crucial for content marketing in large companies:

• Acceleration of content delivery
• Flexible utilization of media content
• Content efficiency insight and AI-aided analysis
• Fast adaptation.

ACCELERATION OF CONTENT DELIVERY

Adobe Asset Link is an application that helps to share, review, edit and coordinate content within Creative Cloud solutions. Now it has become possible to add users from management, marketing, and IT departments to carry out content-related tasks. Presumably, in this format, it will be easier and quicker to approve and release promotional material.

Advantages of a new version of Adobe Experience Manager:

1. Searching, reviewing and editing of the content is executed within a united environment. Company design can be implemented by means of Adobe content collections.

2. File details are available directly in Photoshop, In Design, Illustrator. Similar imagery search leveraging Adobe Sensei.

3. Storing the data in Work-in-progress format in several environments.

4. Adding and copying new assets into AEM form Creative Clouds.

5. Ability to comment on the project on-stream.

6. Unified login to Asset Link workspace and Creative Cloud solutions.

Desktop App within AEM 6.5 has undergone a number of major improvements. One of them is an ability to review and edit any content in any desktop app, including other vendor’s solutions.

Advantages:

1. A smaller need in Finder/Explorer when viewing AEM-content.
2. Content search within the app.
3. Preview assets and open them in the associated app.
4. Edit locally and upload prepared content into AEM.
5. Upload files and folder hierarchies to AEM with progress monitoring.

Brand Portal allows receiving of approved promotional materials and managing their distribution for the external party and also within the company and among the users. According to Adobe this part of the AEM 6.5 platform is crucial – the vendor guarantees secured file transfer inaccessible for the third-party.

Enhancement list:

• Accelerated file processing when downloading.
• Introduction of a “guest” user to enable collaboration with advertising agencies.
• Ability to schedule content publishing.
• User activities reporting and content share reporting based on login.
• Accelerated browsing and viewing of the content.
• New admin configurations to control upload sizes.
• Stable performance when an external command is engaged.

It is apparent that AEM 6.5 will give the opportunity to bring a creative cluster represented by advertising specialists into the project. Benefit from using CMS has become even more apparent – it is now easier to prepare, enhance and approve advertising content considering common environment and supervision from every party.

Digital Assets Management Previously a client had to “tie” their website to the platform when using AEM. Then, to have the media on their website, the client had to archive it, upload it to the platform and remove it if the goods or content were no longer available.

AEM 6.5 helped to eliminate these steps by leveraging Digital Assets Management tool, which allows to:

1. Use files from remote DAM when browsing a page
2. Connect with remote DAM on a cloud
3. Drag and drop virtual assets into the local sites page editor
4. Preview web pages with remote DAM assets
5. Edit remote DAM assets on sites with a local copy
6. Publish pages with remote DAM assets.

Content translation system has been enhanced with automatic algorithms and quality integration with outside services. More new features in AEM 6.5:

• Auto-approve of translated materials
• Auto-delete of translation launches
• Using translated projects in AEM projects
• Updating translations in integrated services with pre-storing in Translation Memory
• Exporting translation jobs in JSON format.

Interactive Communication solution enables marketers to quickly set-up communication with clients on multiple sites. Now you are able to:

• In a single environment create templates of press kits, partner and special offers, letter chains for web, mobile, and print.
• Quickly change scenarios for improvement/approval, reuse them – all in improved in-out system
• Easily bind sources with button combination and drag and drop function.

FLEXIBLE UTILIZATION OF MEDIA CONTENT

5 major aspects contributed to this group of improvements within Adobe Experience Manager 6.5:

1. Working with the base of content
2. Working with side content which can be published separately from the base content
3. Download and set-up forms and documentation
4. Content services designed for working with separate fragments
5. Single Page Applicator (SPA editor).

New in Single Page Applicator

SPA editor became available in AEM 6.4 and above. The latest version of the editor allows you to edit single-page sites and immediately submit the changes. More, server data transfer now supports JavaScript, which helps to reduce page loading time, hence ameliorate SEO promotion.

Core components Now it’s easier for developers to write new websites or add-ons in AEM. JavaScript Framework is also available. To accelerate the process platform carries 20 easy-to-style components for use in a new template. Components are ready for download as Open Source objects.

Teaser – link to content with imagery Carousel – slideshow with images and links Tabs – a solution that sorts content by tabs See more components available.

Core components features:

1. Pre-setup for convenient use
2. Ability to present content in various styles.
3. Easy to use: components operate under WCAG 2.0 standard and support navigation from the keyboard.
4. SEO friendly: output HTML delivers markup for schema.org.
5. Ready for PWA/SPA/App. If components are written in JSON or Sling, models can be edited on the client’s side.
6. Expansibility: it is possible to make a unique model based on the standard component.
7. Version awareness: is components’ logics has been changed all the changes are transferred into a new version.

What is Experience Intelligence and how to measure it

Experience Intelligence employs analytics which utilizes AI and machine learning in those aspects where classic marketing might not do the job. Adobe Experience Manager with Adobe Sensei tool can analyze and find common patterns of customer behavior on your website over the last few years toward specific content.

Adobe Sensei allows to quickly find all similar SKUs available. Also, this AI tool will eliminate all issues related to cross-device content display.

That’s how Sensei works:

Smart Crop feature is engaged as soon as the platform has identified a user’s device type.

With sophisticated automated forms, vendors will be able to collect relevant data about their prospects. This feature of Experience Intelligence allows to scan print version of a form and to identify each information block. Each block can be separately edited, updated or removed. No more unnecessary paperwork and outdated PDF’s.

New features for automated forms:

1. New styles have been added. Supports new markups and templates.
2. Flexibility in creating new templates: blocks can be dragged from a library from the user’s stock. Ability to undo steps and to set properties for all fields.
3. Digital signing using Digital IDs based on PKI infrastructure, digital certificates, and local legislation.
4. Addition of OOTB components for online forms and SPAs.

Data exchange between Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics makes it possible to detect anomalies in ad campaigns, carry out A/B tests and perform audience segmentation. Adobe Analytics will provide a marketer with the main dashboard with essential metrics and also with additional tabs for a more detailed analysis of a specific channel of a content type.

Fast Adaptation

Cloud Manager is the main novelty in this part of the platform. This part of Adobe Experience Manager enables marketers together with IT-department to orchestrate the platform in 3 key directions:

1. Quality Control. Eliminates the risk of website errors by running campaigns in test mode. Reduce development cycle with the help of code auto-check and cutting-edge tools.

2. Automatic stability. The system automatically determines the need for additional stability if the visitor flow spikes. In order to ensure uninterrupted content delivery, Cloud Manager’s API-interface (available in Adobe I/O) gives the ability to connect either to external systems or to other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.

3. Updates. The new step-by-step infrastructure allows to update content more efficiently and to upgrade to newest AEM versions without affecting your current project. This feature will become available from May 2019.

AEM 6.5 supports:

1. Oracle JDK 11 “Long Term Support” releases (LTS);
2. Oracle JDK Java 8 (LTS).

At release presentation, Adobe speakers drew the audience’s attention to the fact that agreements for integration with Oracle services listed above had been made between the vendors beforehand. However, this facilitation is only available for AEM projects. The platform doesn’t support Java 9 and Java 10.

Updates and features covered in the article are the most significant ones in AEM 6.5 suit. In total 1200 technical experts from 368 Adobe partner companies took part in AEM 6.5 beta testing worldwide. The work went on for 3 months from January to March 2019. International IT-specialist team launched AEM Quickstart for more than 600 times and eliminated 75 technical issues.

AEM 6.5 release has become a landmark event for Adobe as well for business, marketing, and IT communities. By tradition, the vendor once again has set a trend for the development of media delivery and deeper cross-tool integration. With the emergence of the new version of Adobe Experience Manager marketers and IT-specialist can work in tight collaboration. The outcome of such collaboration is the immediate delivery of personalized content.

Questions? Contact our regional AEM product director and learn more about how your business can benefit from using AEM platform.

Additional material: Talk from Adobe Community Belarus about "AEM 6.5: tricks, killers features, fixes".