As we think about some of the key innovations and trends in the digital space, one of the most significant drivers is the rising customer expectations, including for a higher level of personalization wherever and whenever they choose to interact with your brand.
Examples are plenty – for instance when you’re listening to music, apps like Spotify personalize your listening experience with customized playlists and recommendations of new tracks based on your habits and streaming intelligence. Another example is when you book a plane ticket online. Airline websites do not just display flight results, but rather create smart search experiences covering all your travel needs, with highly personalized recommendations based on your earlier searches and purchase behavior.
Adobe has not missed these cues from the market, and that’s why Adobe Experience Manager has stepped up a notch with its new version AEM 6.5. As the so-called ‘content explosion’ fuels demand for the rapid creation of brand assets such as images and video, AEM 6.5 key updates are all about helping marketers and developers to collaborate to scale efficiently.
The core of AEM remains the same: AEM Sites, AEM Assets and AEM Forms come to play at the center of experience management. With the new Adobe Experience Manager 6.5, Adobe continues to extend the Experience Manager’s capabilities for organizations of all sizes, with four key focus themes: Content Velocity, Fluid Experiences, Experience intelligence and Cloud Agility.
Let’s take a closer look at what these innovations mean to your customer experience management.
1. Content Velocity
Content delivery across channels is now even easier. AEM 6.5 brings easy to use tools for better marketing collaboration – content managers, creative authors and webmasters are equipped to create engaging content more efficiently. This means, for example, you can work in AEM 6.5 without leaving the apps that you’re most familiar with. Using the in-app panel in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign you can seamlessly search, use and edit assets from AEM directly within the Creative Cloud apps.
Digital assets are now easily accessible on desktop or can be used in any desktop applications. You can easily find assets through Mac Finder or Windows Explorer, open or edit them in your usual desktop applications, and then save the changes back to AEM.
The upgraded Digital Asset Management (DAM) repository in AEM has also more configuration and security options to accelerate asset sourcing and two-way distribution in a more flexible way. These new tools allow you to share assets within AEM with your extended team or network, including external creative agencies or other partners.
2. Fluid experiences
Fluid experiences makes content management easier than ever. Combining profile data and content, AEM 6.5 helps you manage and develop experiences with agility across owned, earned and paid end-points.
It is applicable to the management of content and experiences for both headful and headless CMS scenarios. The addition of content fragment support in the Assets HTTP API makes it very easy to integrate omnichannel content in a json consuming channel.
Fluid Experience accelerates creation of a new site or extension of an existing site in AEM, including a site built using SPA JavaScript framework. Some of the new production-ready core components include Teaser, Carousel, Tabs, Separator, Download and Accordion. With 20 easy to style and production ready components it helps reduce time-to-market. It also simplifies upgrades with backward compatibility.
3. Experience Intelligence
Adobe Sensei’s artificial intelligence and machine learning features enable you to create an intuitive customer experiences that appeal to each of your target markets or audience segments.
AEM 6.5 aims to provide relevant user experiences to every customer. With data driven insights, content discovery and dynamic composition you’re able to deliver personalized experiences more efficiently. Some of the features that are there to help include AI for editing images and videos, to highlight or crop sections according to the most important points of interest in each of these formats. Sensei also powers asset search, making it faster through personalized suggestions, for example with the Visual Search tool. Furthermore, Adobe Sensei powers automatic conversion of legacy PDF forms and traditional input fields to digital, mobile-responsive, adaptive forms.
It’s never been easier to manage and discover the right assets and deliver engaging experiences with digital signage, all thanks to Adobe Sensei.
4. Cloud agility:
Cloud agility aims to deliver experiences faster, allowing brands to more rapidly adapt to customer expectations, shifts in demand or new trends in the market.
With Adobe managed services like hosting and website maintenance, for example, your AEM instance automatically detects when the production environment is in an unusual high load and there’s need for more capacity. This automatic adjustment to website traffic fluctuations guarantees that the customer experience won’t be affected by any operational limitations.
The new AEM update also seeks to deliver a faster and less troublesome customization and update for IT and development teams. The focus is to not compromise on the performance or security towards the end user.