Click on the map below to see when the AEM Mobile tour will be coming to a city near you!

AEM Mobile Tour Dates

Los Angeles, CA — June 2nd

We’re sorry, this event has already passed. We would be happy to schedule an in person demo!

Yes! I would like a demo of AEM Mobile!

San Francisco, CA — June 9th

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Yes! I would like a demo of AEM Mobile!

New York, NY — June 14th

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Yes! I would like a demo of AEM Mobile!

Boston, MA — June 16th

Time

Thursday, June 16 2:00–8:00pm

Location

100 Stuart Street
Great Room A, B
Boston, MA 02116

Featured Speaker

Adam Smith – Partner, Blink Worldwide

Register to Attend More Information

Dallas, TX — June 21st

Time

Tuesday, June 21 2:00–8:00pm

Location

1530 Main Street
Praetorian Ballroom
Dallas, TX 75201

Featured Speaker

Lahary Ravuri – Head of Marketing, Adobe Experience Manager Mobile

Register to Attend More Information

What’s lurking behind this customer experience issue? There are a number of reasons, and data fragmentation is among them.

Consider for a moment at how fast data is growing each day. Worldwide digital data grows exponentially, and it’s expected to double every two years. What’s surprising is that only 0.5% of it is ever analyzed.

The profound volume and types of data created is a blessing and a curse for marketers. There’s an opportunity to harness this information, using it to make data-driven business decisions and providing more personalized experiences.

Data silos are among the top obstacles for marketers – where data lives and how it integrates with other systems so it can be accessed and used by the people who need it.

Other challenges involve technology and people. Many organizations lack the right analytics tools and people with the right skills or training that can turn data into insights.

How do you overcome this? And more importantly, how can you improve the 45% of consumers who aren’t satisfied with their experience?

When you employ a digital marketing platform like Adobe Marketing Cloud, you will be able to track, analyze, and report on customers’ activities across digital marketing channels – not just what happens on your website.

Want to learn more about demolishing data silos and solving other common digital marketing challenges? Download our latest guide below.

Sound familiar?

Between call centers, social media, email, mobile apps, and brick-and-mortar stores, your customers have multiple options for engaging with your company. The downside is that when the data coming from these channels aren’t connected, the experience can be confusing and off-putting. Not to mention that your customers’ frustration can be amplified when encountering vastly different experiences across your mobile, desktop, and eCommerce sites.

As a digital marketer, you must optimize content to maintain customers’ attention and meet their expectations to remain competitive. You might wonder, “How will this impact my business?”

A study of customer journeys by Harvard Business Review followed companies in two industries, insurance and pay TV. The companies that excelled in delivering journeys outperformed the competition with:

• 30-40% improvement in overall customer satisfaction
• 20-30% better performance in revenue, repeat purchases, and positive word of mouth

When you focus on delivering a journey that aligns to customer expectations, you position yourself to jump ahead of the competition. With a digital marketing platform like Adobe Marketing Cloud, you can create a seamless customer journey by organizing data and delivering a connected experience.

Want to learn more about creating a connected customer journey and solving other common digital marketing challenges? Download our latest guide below.

According to Gartner, 89% of companies expect to compete on customer experience in 2016. And in just four years, it’s estimated that 85% of a customer’s relationship with a brand won’t include face-to-face interactions. (Got your attention?)

Personalization is key not only for customer acquisition but also for customer retention. In the 2016 Annual Digital Trends Survey, companies that want to meet (or exceed) customer expectations need to deliver experiences that are: 

• Personalized and relevant (25%)
• Valuable (25%)
• Easy to understand (17%)

To create personalized experiences, marketing organizations need a solid digital marketing platform that supports their well-defined personalization strategies.

Many marketing departments choose to standardize on a single platform, easing the support and integration required for disparate, existing tools. Adobe Experience Manager, the content management pillar within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, is one such example.

Updates included in the recent release of Adobe Experience Manager 6.2 include features that make it easier for marketers to:

• Personalize and target offers
• Understand which assets are performing well (or not so well)
• Create connected experiences across mobile apps, forms, and in-person (or in-store)

Want to learn more about exceeding customer expectations and solving other common digital marketing challenges? Download our latest guide below.

In the latest release of Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe has simplified authoring personalized content. In addition to some exciting new features, this release includes a new integration with Adobe Target. The new integration allows authors to edit personalized content directly within AEM.

Given the strong ROI of personalization, the improved AEM / Target integration will be a big win for Adobe customers.

Authoring Personalized Experiences with AEM & Target

While at Adobe Summit, I attended the lab “Integrating Experience Manager with Adobe Analytics, Target and DTM”, which showcased the new AEM / Target integration. In only one hour, we were able to set up the integration and personalize content.

In this post, I’ll show the process for authoring personalized content in AEM with Adobe Target. For more information on setting up the integration, please see the Summit Session documents. The images below are credits the authors of the lab.

1. Configure an Activity in AEM

The first step to using Adobe Target in AEM is to configure your Activity. An activity is an instance of targeting on a page. Each activity gets a name and you can configure which targeting engine, configuration and targeting type to use.

To create a new Activity, first, select the Brand (which is a container of activities for a particular brand or site) and then click the + button. If you wanted to modify an existing activity, you would select the name of activity from the drop-down.

2. Define Targets

Next, define the components to be targeted. You can define any number of components to be targeted on the page. To do so, simply select the Targeting icon on the component’s edit bar while in targeting mode.

When you target a component, AEM replaces the existing component with a targeting container and makes the existing content the default.

3. Create Experiences

Once you have your components selected for the Activity, you need to create the experiences. Experiences are content variants shown to a particular audience or are groups of users based on criteria. By default, only the DEFAULT experience will be displayed when the Activity is first created.

To add an experience, select “+ Add Experience Targeting”. This will allow you to choose from among the pre-defined audiences or create a new audience to target.

You can create any number of audiences and order them in order in which they will be selected by Target.

4. Create the Experience Content

Once you’ve defined the experiences, select each one and update the content in the targeted components. You can change content, images or anything else you can edit within an AEM component.

You can quickly switch between experiences in authoring mode by selecting the experience name on the right. This allows you to see how the content appears in each experience.

5. Finish and Publish

Once you have created the content for the experiences, review and finish the setup of the Activity.

From this screen, you can define how reporting will be tracked for the Activity as well as the goals for the Activity. This will allow marketers to see reports on the success of the personalization activity.

Once you have verified and finished the Activity, publish the page to push the changes to the live website. AEM will publish all the content to the live site simultaneously to ensure website consistency.

Bonus: Testing Experiences

To ensure your targeting is working correctly, AEM includes the ability to view and modify the Client Context. The Client Context stores data on the current user and can / should be used for configuring segments inside AEM and Target. To view the Client Context, switch to Preview mode in AEM and then select the Client Context Hub icon. This will allow you to modify the variables in the client context and switch between segments to see the different experiences.

Personalization Unleashed

With AEM and Target, brands can delight their customers by providing rich, personalized experiences. At the same time, the new integration means authors have less overhead maintaining content.

Brands understand the need of personalization and the new AEM / Target integration allows them to make it happen.

Need help with understanding personalization with AEM & Target? Leave a comment below and I’d be happy to help!

“The Adobe Experience Manager Specialization helps Perficient not only to differentiate itself in the market but also provides instant credibility with clients and prospects,” commented Robert Sumner, Adobe practice director for Perficient.

The Experience Manager Specialization also further elevates our Business Partner status from the perspective of Adobe.

“Our inclusion in this elite group of partners is a clear indication of how we’re continuing to advance our Adobe partnership. When Adobe sellers need to recommend vendors for implementations, they look to partners with the credentials and solid experience,” said Lynn Brading, Perficient alliance manager for Adobe US Sales.

Achieving this distinction is a testament to our commitment from the entire Adobe practice. With our deep expertise and practical experience in Adobe Experience Manager, it was a logical next step to work towards earning this Specialization.

Colleagues from our Adobe practice – from developers to business architects to sales – had to meet the training, hands-on experience, and rigorous testing certifications required by Adobe. The requirements for the Specialization include:

• 3 certified business practitioners
• 6 certified developers
• 1 certified lead developer/architect
• 2 certified sales specialists

Aaron Price, Perficient senior manager for Adobe client services, sought out and encouraged members of the practice to earn certifications specific to their roles.

“With all that’s involved in achieving this Specialization, it establishes a level of trust between Adobe and Perficient because it shows we are investing in their technology as much as they are investing in us,” said Price.

Additionally, Adobe requires three customer references of Experience Manager implementations, which include our successes with Symantec, Thompson Reuters, and Cardinal Health. These references are among the multi-year, multi-project implementations we have with more than 75 clients.

To build on the solid foundation of Experience Manager implementations, our Adobe practice is now working towards Adobe Specializations for Analytics, Campaign, and Target.

“While Adobe Experience Manager is our wheelhouse, we are not stopping there. This Specialization has launched Perficient into the upper-echelon of Adobe partners, and we are energized to continue earning more Specializations because of the opportunities they provide for Perficient,” said Sumner.

Learn more about the depth of our Adobe experience and how it will help you realize the full value of your investment.

AEM Implementation

Google provides an easy to use REST API for label identification (detecting individual objects on an image), landmarks detection, sentiment analysis, logo detection and amazing optical character recognition (OCR).  These services can be used within any application with access to images.

Into the details …

Google requires registration with the Vision Services and establishing an authentication scheme for authentication and/or authorization.  The simplest authentication scheme is an “API Key”.   This scheme provides a JSON file which can be referenced in the code for authentication.

We have created an AEM service to invoke Google’s API.  This service can be referenced by any component, service, or workflow process.  We extended the OOTB workflow “Update DAM Asset” to include the additional process of calling this service for every asset added to the DAM.

Our process determines the type of annotation coming back from Google (label, landmark, sentiment, or logo) and creates a tag in the corresponding taxonomy (see screenshots above).  The process also includes an OCR Vision call, which when made extracts the text identified on the image and populates the metafield “dc:description” on the DAM asset.

AEM “Smart Tags”

Adobe has also announced a native auto asset tagging feature called “Smart Tags” in its AEM 6.2 beta version which was received very well at the Adobe Summit—The Digital Marketing Conference 2016.  Though it is not available for public yet, it would be very interesting to compare it with Google Cloud Vision API’s once available. The Google Vision / AEM integration will work in any version of AEM, not just 6.2.

Conclusion

We are very excited to see what machine learning and AI are contributing to asset repositories in terms of classification. As we keep testing, we are amazed at the great results and disappointed with few misses (It seems to always fail to recognize the Nike logo). As Chad pointed out, the results are not always accurate and for a beta release of Cloud API, we are very impressed. We would now like to see how they compare with Adobe “Smart Tagging” native feature.

Not so fast.

If you read the fine print, clustering on AEM is not recommended by Adobe on publish instances. You see, clustering on AEM introduces a new level of dependencies and complexity due to the reliance on MongoDB secondaries across data centers, and thus the argument is that clustering in AEM can decrease reliability and performance. That direction from Adobe pretty much throws the the whole high availability clustering use case we find in the application server world out the window.

Instead Adobe recommends stand-alone TarMK farms for failover of publish instances. Farms have better performance, are easily scaled, and because they are synced with the Author instance, are inherently fault tolerant. But where to cluster then?

Author! Author!

There are several uses cases for clustering the AEM Author instances, but as you may have read in my other posts, I am not a fan of clustering author instances simply for failover. That can be achieved using TarMK Cold Standby’s with far less complexity and moving parts. See: AEM Infrastructure Series: Disaster Recovery Basics.

For me to recommend a clustering deployment, I like to see one of these use cases:

• Exceeding the authoring capacity limits of concurrent editors and contributors (the users accessing the authoring server). And (this is important) where sharding the author instance is not feasible. More about this later.
• Where regional performance of the authoring instance is important. Authoring in AEM tends to be “chatty” and low latency can vastly improve the perceived performance of an author instance.
• Where uptime of the authoring instance is critical—organizations that cannot survive even a few minutes of authoring downtime (I’ve yet to encounter this when you dig deep).

Sharding?

In simple terms, sharding is a technique used to split very large databases into smaller, faster more easily managed parts. An often overlooked option is to manually shard the authoring instances, that is to physically split the sites into separate AEM authoring instances. These could be:

• Physical sites, e.g. a primary www vs. a support or intranet site.
• Portions of existing sites, e.g. localized sites where live copies are not required.
• Separating global assets from the primary site authoring instance, e.g. a Global Corporate DAM.

Keep in mind that with independent author instances, each can have their own TarMK Cold Standby, be regionally located to reduce latency, and have separate maintenance cycles. And you don’t need Mongo DBA resources.

Sharding requires careful forethought and planning, often digging deep into the use cases and asking lots of questions and making decisions. This should be done during your initial AEM standup—questions and advice your AEM consultants should be providing.

Performance Tips

Why performance tips? Because maximizing performance of your authoring instances can reduce or eliminate the need for clustering based on concurrency. Remember that Oak uses out of process memory for deserialization, speeding up performance. Thus where in a 5.x system we could get along with 8-12 GB of memory, in a 6.x system we recommend 64 GB with 8 GB of JVM. Also:

• Dedicated CPU cores can increase performance. We typically recommend 12 or 16 cores.
• SSD storage for the repository folder.
• If your internal infrastructure team is balking at that much SSD storage, using Oak FileDataStore to separate the document store to slower magnetic media, while leaving the node store on the faster SSD media. Note: we are still waiting for Adobe’s blessing on using the newer and more efficient Oak FileBlobStore. As of this writing it’s technically available, but not supported.
• Use Sling Offloading to offload high CPU jobs.

All of the above will help you extract more performance out of a single licensed AEM author instance, and thus further reduce the need for clustering due to concurrency.

Adobe Resources

• Recommended Deployments
• Adobe Performance Tuning Tips for 6.x
• Jackrabbit Oak – the next generation content repository
• Creating and Consuming Jobs for Offloading

When planning an Adobe Experience Manager on premise deployment, I always ask the the question “What is your tolerance for a site outage?” And the answer is almost always “None.” This is not surprising as I knew the answer before I asked the question.

It may seem obvious that loss of your ecommerce site, even temporarily, can be severely detrimental to sales. But the truth is that all types of businesses suffer–expectations are high that your site is always available or your corporate image may be tarnished. Why then is redundancy and disaster recovery not a part of all AEM stand-ups?

Cost? Most IT organizations have disaster recovery plans and initiatives in place, and when properly planned, an AEM infrastructure that is regionally fault tolerant is not necessarily an expensive proposition. Once I explain the options, it’ll be hard to say no.

Author Instances

First let’s look at a fault tolerant authoring instance. As you’ll see in other blog posts, I’m not a fan of Oak clustering as an answer for fault tolerance, and there are very specific use cases that need to be met before I’ll bless a 6.x clustering design. Clustering increases complexity, is slower than native TarMK and requires specialized DBAs to manage MongoDB instances. DBA resources that few customers have. With AEM 6.x there are other database options, but they require “Engineering / Support approval” and few, if any customers are actually running this in production. Do you want to be first?

A better alternative is to use the TarMK Cold Standby feature, spanning the standbys across physical data centers. Sure, a Cold Standby requires a short amount of downtime as they must be manually activated, but most organizations can tolerate Authoring outages for short periods of time.

Publish Instances

It’s simpler than you think. Load balanced publishers in multiple data centers protect against complete data center outages and if licensed, can provide increased capacity. A global load balancer can route traffic among data centers handing out IP addresses to visitors. Talk to your Adobe rep about licensing for instances that will be accepting traffic (an active/active scenario), versus instances that will only accept traffic in a disaster recovery situation (active/passive).

Configure dependent services like LDAP, SMTP and federated search with fallback when possible.

Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan

Your organization likely already has a disaster recovery plan template created for other projects, and may require you use the template when creating your AEM disaster recovery plan. Using a common template provides documentation consistency for system administrators while executing a plan in a real DR situation. Elements a disaster recovery plan should include:

• Basic information around the plan purpose, scope, objectives and strategies;
• Primary contacts and call lists;
• Hardware and software inventories with sizing, mounts, IP, DNS names, login information, and any other special information required to understand the platform;
• Infrastructure diagrams to visually show connectivity and interaction between devices, including port numbers, firewalls, IP addresses and DNS names;
• Upstream dependencies, how to validate and who to contact;
• Tasking orders with detailed recovery procedures, and return to normal procedures;
• Detailed testing procedures and the results when initially tested (always test your plan!);

When writing a disaster recovery plan, assume the reader knows literally nothing about the platform. This helps you write and test with clarity to help ensure success during recovery.

And yes, pouring hot water through a coffee filter into a cup does render a decent cup of coffee. Thank you. Disaster averted.

Adobe Resources

• Recommended Deployments
• How to Run AEM with TarMK Cold Standby

The Adobe Deploying and Maintaining AEM documents are an invaluable reference for the new or experienced systems administrator installing and configuring Adobe Experience Manager on premise. Despite the wealth of references, I all too often see installations that were not well thought through and result in maintenance headaches that would have been easy to avoid, but can be challenging to remedy after-the-fact. Common problems include:

• Inconsistent installation paths, permissions, and ownership;
• Inconsistent startup settings and overall configuration;
• No planning or forethought for disaster recovery and expansion;
• Little or no monitoring of AEM instances;
• Poorly documented release processes and inconsistent access restrictions;
• Lack of, or not adhering to a standardized maintenance plan;

These are just a few of the challenges customers face; employee turnover and juggling multiple vendors only aggravates the problem. Deploying AEM for the long-term involves careful planning, clear and repeatable documentation, and a maintenance plan that follows established best practices not just from Adobe, but from your internal IT team.

It seems obvious, right?

Not always. For organizations that are new to AEM, getting up and running initially on the platform in a way that adheres best practices and promotes long-term maintainability is often overlooked. This task is sometimes given to an experienced AEM developer, but with little or no actual system skills, or an experienced system administrator, but with no AEM experience.

If you are embarking on a new project to stand-up your AEM foundation, here are some tips:

Pre-Installation Tips

• Understand best practices from your internal IT organization around separation of systems (e.g. dispatcher zones vs. author/publish instance zones, firewalls, load balancers, etc.).
• Create a detailed topology diagram for all environments showing each server and device along with detailed port maps. This visually communicates infrastructure needs, shows how internal and external system interact with one another, as well as what firewall ports and load balancer pools, etc. need to be created.
• Obtain the necessary approvals and get started on build sheets early.
• Understand Disaster Recovery requirements, AEM Cold Standby’s, clustering, Jackrabbit Oak Document Store configuration options, and physical sizing requirements. All of these decisions will affect infrastructure topology and build.

Installation Tips

• Completely read Adobe’s Deploying and Maintaining AEM.
• I encourage anyone that will be deploying and maintenance AEM in an enterprise environment to attend the Adobe AEM System Administration. This training can be invaluable and offers a well-rounded view of how to deploy AEM.
• Draft and fully test detailed step-by-step installation documentation locally or on test servers before finalizing.
• Establish a set of configuration parameters that can be used both during the initial system stand-up and as a health check guide for the future.
• Read through the Adobe Security Hardening Checklist, and maintain a list of your own hardening instructions.
• Don’t always go for the latest version, unless there is a compelling feature you can’t live without. Our general rule is to wait until the first service pack is released.
• Implement a change management process that includes updating all relevant documentation, including disaster recovery, service packs, hotfixes, health check and hardening guides, etc.

Development, Build and Release Processes Tips

• It’s likely your organization has standardized release process guidelines that can be adopted for AEM, and if not you’ll need to develop them.
• Make sure the guidelines include necessary security and code scans, release notes templates, rollback procedures, and any other checkpoints required before moving between environments.  
• Establish source control and document a branching structure early on, before the first line of code is developed.
• A developer Standard Operating Procedures document should be created to accelerate developer onboarding and again provide consistency.

And if you are choosing an AEM vendor for the first time, you are now armed with knowledge to quiz their maturity level around AEM on premise deployments.