According to a Commonwealth Fund study, the average American visits the doctor only four times per year and that number is declining. One of the drivers behind this behavioral change is accessibility to medical information.

Here’s a great example – in a study of millennials by ZocDoc, it was reported that this group is more likely to research symptoms online, with 28% self-diagnosing and 36% self-medicating before seeing a doctor.

When patients only see doctors when they’re sick or injured, it impacts the overall quality of care they could receive. With a more complete view of a patient, healthcare professionals can provide in-depth care and counsel that focuses on overall wellness or even detect the onset of a chronic condition.

Creating a connected health experience that’s ingrained in patients’ daily lives is one solution, and the need has never been greater to help doctors and hospital systems support their patients digitally.

Our team at Perficient developed DailyDose, a patient engagement app built on Adobe Experience Manager Mobile. With a solution that aligns with consumer/patient behaviors, this will support lowering patient readmissions, driving lower healthcare costs and increasing patient engagement.

Watch the video for a peek at DailyDose.

See how Adobe Experience Manager Mobile can help you build engaging mobile moments, and register for one of the upcoming AEM Mobile Roadshow events.

Washington, D.C. | July 14, 2016

Chicago, IL | July 19, 2016

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

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!

New York, NY — June 14th

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!

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.

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!

Overview

Perficient was self tasked to feature a highly interactive, visually compelling Adobe Summit App built in AEM Mobile that allows users to see real-time analytics from Adobe Workbench, an interactive analytics application part of Adobe Analytics that allows you to build visualization dashboards, as well as experience personalized content based off their responses on the survey taken from their mobile device.

Challenge

Integrating DTM and Target on a single page application in AngularJs, a JavaScript front-end framework.

The application was built with Cordova (formally known as Adobe PhoneGap), a hybrid app development framework which consist of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, we were able to leverage the mobile platform’s Web view to render content. Since DTM is a JavaScript based container, we were able to integrate many of the other Adobe Marketing Cloud products that we come so accustom to.

Using DTM as a host for Adobe Tools such as Adobe Analytics and Target, you are able to push, configure, track, integrate and perform marketing initiatives such as performing A/B tests with different components on the page and tracking user activities on your app.

STEP 1

We built a base template for each page (“mobileapps/components/angular/ng-page”) and we extended our pages from that template by creating an AEM (CQ) project using Apache Maven, a building management tool.

STEP 2

After configuring our property in Adobe Dynamic Tag Management, we went to our first page in the app, in this case the login page, and inserted the DTM bootleg snippet.

“<script src=”https://assets.adobedtm.com/3215e845c9690cbe968752c99b825440070e111f/satelliteLib-21077d4adfcbef88029b6d7609a4be07d51b0616-staging.js”></script>”

Notes: Place snippet before the end of <head> section in the head.jsp;

Screenshots from CRXDE Lite (Adobe AEM) and Maven Project

STEP 3

In the login page component, go to body.jsp, and insert the DTM snippet in the body of the page.

“<script type=”text/javascript”>_satellite.pageBottom();</script>”

Notes: Place snippet before the end of <body>;

Screenshots from CRXDE Lite (Adobe AEM) and Maven Project

STEP 4

Since the summit app is an Angular SPA, we just needed to put the snippets in the first page, and the JS will be loaded/available for all other pages.

Therefore the next step was to UAT/QA and verify the JS was getting downloaded correctly.

STEP 5

Now we are ready to add our Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target tools in DTM, where we were able to implement our analytics solution design and run different personalize tests based data being collected from Adobe Analytics including custom variables and success events.

If you’re not 100% familiar with Livefyre, here’s a quick overview – this social media content platform allows companies to search and gather user generated content from Twitter, Instagram and other networks to not only monitor customer sentiment but also engage and monetize this content.

Integrating these capabilities with Adobe Experience Manager will empower brands and advertisers with the meaningful data that will help them create more personalized customer experiences.

And when you think about taking customer generated data and how you could sync it with all data from Adobe Marketing Cloud Co-op, the possibilities and opportunities are endless. Not only will you have information about customer behaviors across devices but you’ll also have insight into what excites them (or on the flip side, what’s off-putting.)

It will be exciting to watch this strategic play unfold. Stay tuned for a follow up as Adobe is sure to reveal more in the weeks to come.

“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