By integrating best-in-class rich content authoring and creation with best-in-class enterprise commerce, we can provide a single, unified solution for all consumer touchpoints. At the same time, retailers can optimize and personalize the shopping experience, in real time, by testing different content types based on purchase data. (Tom Griffin, Demandware)

Makes good sense, doesn’t it? The integration of best-in-class content authoring and publishing, digital marketing and analytics (Adobe) with an omnichannel commerce engine and storefront (Demandware) is so obvious that it’s kind of a no-brainer.

Of course, integrating content and commerce is nothing new. We’ve been doing it since the earliest days of the internet as a sales engine.  The two diverged as specialized platforms for first web content management, and then e-commerce, became the rage in the past decade—but the obvious next step on either side was to reach back out and embrace the other.

Certain platforms and software companies have seen limited success in this regard, but for quite some time the only way for an online retailer to achieve a “best-in-class” experience was through custom integration between a pure-play CMS and a pure-play e-commerce platform.

Born in the Cloud

To some extent, that’s still the case; Adobe and Demandware remain different companies with different software platforms and different licenses.  The value of this particular partnership, however—what sets it apart and makes it so exciting—is that it’s born in the cloud.

The Adobe Marketing Cloud is more than just the CMS—Adobe Experience Manager.  It’s digital marketing and analytics, rich media and more, and it’s a unified cloud platform offering the flexibility and scalability that software-as-a-service provides as its primary value proposition.  Similarly, Demandware is a purely cloud-based solution— and that cloud DNA is what sets it apart from the rest of its peers.  The ability to scale up or down quickly to meet demand is a huge advantage for any retailer—B2C or B2B—who anticipates seasonal or market-driven shifts in volume.

Not Quite Yet, Though…

Naturally, there will be challenges down the road as these software companies seek to present an integrated offering.  The integration itself is officially still in pilot mode, and big questions are yet to be answered.  As a wizened green Jedi Master told us back in 1980, “Always in motion, the future is.”  On balance, though, the prospects offered by this announcement are too exciting to ignore.

What is Live Copy?

Live Copy is a feature in Adobe Experience Manager where the content and structure of a source site is copied to target sites via a configurable process. This can either be automatic or manual, and can even invoke other processes like automatic publication workflows upon changes to the source site.

As shown in the illustration above, a source site (or blueprint) contains the base content and structure. The Live Copied sites (Local Branch 1 and Local Branch 2) will receive updates with the shared content, which is shown in red. The blue content is created for each individual local site and will not be shared with the blueprint site or the other local sites. This same process can act within a page, allowing authors to add, change or remove pieces of content on a page while preserving the live copy link for the rest of the page content. Live Copies can also be Live Copied allowing the creation of multiple blueprints, for example, creating a region or service focused blueprint versus the default generic blueprint.

Live Copy Process

The process for creating a live copy is simple. First, an author would log into Adobe Experience Manager and select + Create >> Create Live Copy from the Sites Manager.

Next, the author will select the source or blueprint site:

Then select the destination path, which is the path under which the live copy target site will be created:

Finally, the author enters the site title, name and rollout configurations. The rollout configurations are hooks which are executed by Live Copy on certain event triggers to perform updates to the target site or other actions. For more information, check out this article on creating Rollout Configurations. The two rollout configurations I have selected below will update the content of the Live Copy target when the Live Copy is first executed (Standard rollout config) and update the target whenever there is a modification to the source (Push on modify).

When the author clicks create, the new site will be created and linked back to the source site via Live Copy. From there the content can be managed similarly to any other AEM content and the authors can choose to override any Live Copied page content via canceling inheritance.

You can find more documentation about Live Copy on the Adobe documentation website. If you are facing the problem of managing a large number of similar, but not quite the same websites in Adobe Experience Manager, Live Copy can be the solution to your challenges.

Luckily, when Adobe built AEM 6.0 SP3, they used FSClassLoader version 1.0.2 which includes an OSGi console allowing developers to view the compiled Java files. To view this, open up the OSGi console at http://localhost:4502/system/console and select the console under Sling >> File System Class Loader

From the console you can view or download the compiled .class file, generated .java file or the .deps file which lists the JSP scripts and TagLibs the files depends on.

Hopefully this helps anyone upgrading to AEM 6.0 SP3 and wondering why their generated Java files aren’t appearing under /var/classes

A recent article that I read alluded to the fact that regulatory bodies are struggling to keep their websites updated, which could lead to misinformation or a lack of information for consumers and companies interested in a country’s regulations and policies. The story specifically pointed to the English and Korean versions of South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety’s (MFDS) website. While the website in Korean was up-to-date, the English version was not nearly as well maintained. 

A few visits to other regulatory agency websites in other countries led me to find that most countries, especially less wealthy ones, offer information only in their official languages. Some wealthier nations, like South Korea, did provide their website in multiple languages; typically those that are more frequently spoken among their constituents. For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) offers their website in English and Spanish. Health Canada offers theirs in English and French, and Israel’s Ministry of Health offers theirs in Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, French, and Spanish. Less wealthy countries, like Columbia, offer information in a single language, like Spanish.

Maintaining a website can be a big undertaking, let alone multiple versions in different languages. However, if you’re a government agency or a life sciences company looking to operate in a global environment, and you decide to take the leap and operate a multilingual website, it’s critical to make sure it’s maintained with accurate information – otherwise, it becomes a disservice. Bad information is often worse than no information.

From a technology standpoint, there are plenty of solutions (e.g., Sitecore, Liferay, Adobe Experience Manager, etc.) available to help create and manage large, multilingual websites. There are also a handful of APIs, like Google’s Translate API, that you can plug into your website, largely eliminating the need to maintain multiple versions (although, Google’s API isn’t always accurate).

To learn more about streamlining the digital experience for your customers, drop us a line.

In addition to AEM Sites, Adobe is making their digital asset management system into software as a service, so these same customers can manage images and video as well.  AEM Sites integrates with the digital asset management system, which also allows customers to deliver video and images directly to their marketing sites.

Source: Adobe unveils web management service for mid-sized businesses | VentureBeat | Marketing | by Barry Levine

Brad Rencher, Adobe’s SVP for Marketing Cloud, made the argument to more than 7,000 people attending this year’s conference that customer experience is now the key part of your brand.

Brad Rencher

This makes Digital Marketing the epicenter of your digital transformation efforts. Of course, Adobe is at the epicenter for many brands and wants to be the epicenter of more customers.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, talked about Changing the World Through Digital Experiences. Marketing is on a reinvention journey but fundamentals of marketing are not changing. The art of marketing creative is still a key pat of the equation. Science in the form of data analysis, behavior analytics, etc have contributed to elevating marketing to a new level. Real-time has impacted the enterprise is completely new and different ways.  

This has led to the era of “Your Product is Marketing”, according to Shantanu.  So now, you have to ask broader questions about your products and look at new ways to enhance the customer experience. This has impacted Adobe too and they are looking at how to enhance their own products into a unified experience through the Marketing Cloud. 

Brad came back onstage to talk about consumer expectations around being consistency and continuous. The customer experience is the brand and marketing has to move beyond just marketing. Marketing has to take on the many customer experiences your brand has and make them consistent and continuous.

Coca Cola talked about their mission is to create happiness experiences for their customers. Their marketing efforts are not just about the logo, the colors, or even the product. By creating these happiness experiences they keep consumers connected to the brand.  As an example, they created a “hug machine” for finals week at a college campus.  When a student hugged the machine, they received a Coke in return. It was a fun and creative way to help students relieve stress and connect to the Coca Cola brand.

One way Adobe is developing a unified experience is through the Marketing Cloud. Adobe follows these these principles when looking at the Marketing Cloud:

• Comprehensive
• Integrated across channels both online and offline
• Actionable for both data and content

Brad fired off a bunch of announcements that will detailed out throughout the week at Adobe Summit. Briefly, here are some of those announcements that I could capture as Brad talked:

• Adobe Analytics announced Customer Intelligence (integrate customer data) and Predictive Analytics.
• Experience Manager is the backbone of content in the Marketing Cloud.  AEM Assets provides asset management in a Saas environment. Adobe is also delivering a pre-built AEM to get smaller companies and departments running quickly.
• Campaign has been integrated across all the Marketing Cloud solutions.  They also greatly enhanced the email marketing components of Campaign
• Target will deliver personalization beyond just web and mobile and into IoT.
• Social is mobile enabled so you can publish on the go.
• Media Optimizer has been rebuilt to be more programmatic.

Brad announced two new solutions:

• Adobe Prime Time – this puts the TV experience on any screen.  Marketers can track usage.  There is also continuous delivery from mobile to desktop to TV.
• Adobe Audience Manager connects audiences to programmatic features of the cloud and integrates across the Adobe Core Services.

Connect with Perficient on LinkedIn here.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Horizontal Portals 2014

The leaders for 2014 are still the same leaders as in 2013 and 2012. For the past few years IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have been clustered near each other in the Leader’s quadrant, with Liferay and SAP barely making it into that coveted quadrant.  You can see my post about the 2013 version here: Gartner MQ Horizontal Portals 2013.

It’s clear that Gartner is seeing both IBM and Liferay as leading competitors. Here is Gartner’s take on IBM: “IBM’s long heritage of leadership in the enterprise portal market has brought it the broadest feature set in the industry. IBM has a long list of marquee customers across vertical industries, and it has demonstrated support for nearly every type of B2E, business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B portal initiative.”

Gartner definitely likes what Liferay as accomplished in the past few years. “Even in the face of increasingly large, complex deployments, Liferay continues to build up a pool of satisfied customers. Liferay Portal has often succeeded where portal initiatives using other products were bogged down in cost and complexity.”

We also see several other notable shifts. First Microsoft has moved backward in the vision axis and SAP is moving higher on the vision axis. According to Gartner, Microsoft is being hurt by uncertainty around the future of SharePoint and Office365. Microsoft is definitely making a push to Office365 and many companies want to stay on-premise. Gartner says, “The future of on-premises SharePoint Server is in question.”

SAP has traditionally been viewed as a portal for SAP only.  However SAP has made a lot of investments in enabling better user experiences and can now be seen as a more broadly-based portal by companies.

Another shift in this year’s Magic Quadrant is the inclusion of Sitecore for the first time.  Sitecore is listed as a challenger along with OpenText. Gartner says, “Sitecore appeals most directly to organizations seeking WCM capability for customer-facing Web initiatives, but its offerings are increasingly considered for portals of supporting various business processes and audiences.”

Another traditional Web Content Management product, Ektron, has also made the list for the first time in the Niche Players quadrant.  Ektron is another .net-based application, like Sitecore.  It has traditionally been positioned for customer-facing and marketing sites, but Gartner is starting to see some companies use it for intranets as well.

A final shift I noticed is that Covisint has moved down the execute scale. Covisint went public in 2013 and has suffered some pains as a result of being a publicly traded company.  You can read the Gartner report for more details about Covisint.

Overall, this is interesting information from Gartner and definitely a changing landscape in the Horizontal Portal market.

Much to every one’s surprise, the Wave came out with nobody listed as a Leader.  Adobe, hybris (SAP), IBM and Sitecore came out as the Strong Performers followed by many others in the Contender category. Nobody was listed as a Risky Bet.

So what gives?  Really no Leaders?  Dom Nicastro wrote a story last week about this development: Forrester Wave: No Leaders in Digital Experience Delivery.

Forrester considers a Digital Experience Platform a full end-to-end delivery platform and most vendors fell short in the completeness of their offerings.  Each vendor seemed to shine in one or more areas, but nobody stood out as having all the components needed to be a Digital Experience Leader.

For me, part of the issue stems from how Forrester defined the market.  hybris from SAP is strong in Commerce, while Adobe and Sitecore are more known for their Web Content and Marketing capabilities.  So the companies included in the wave are really all over the map, in my opinion.

Is it fair to compare commerce systems with WCM systems?  Yes and no.  If you need commerce in your digital experience, then you want to know who has commerce capabilities.  If commerce isn’t important, then no and the analysis gets skewed.

There is a lot of interesting information in the Forrester report, so I encourage you to read it yourself.

I’ve included a video of Cedric talking about new features in AEM 6.0.  Cedric demo’d the new features using a tablet to show how they’ve fully enabled the touch interface for the authoring environment.

The first new feature deals with language translation.  This release does a better job of managing translations.  A site contains a language master for the content and then Live Copy is used to created the translated content for each country.  A new References feature allows you too see where a content item is used and where it has been translated.  The translation workflow goes out to a translation vendor through an API that Adobe has built into AEM.

One common problem with language translation that Adobe has addressed is updating translated content when the master changes.  AEM also includes a ‘diff’ tool so you can compare two different copies and identify the differences.

Feature two deals with creating impactful content.  Creating good content is now what drives ranking in search engines, so there is added emphasis on creating good content.  AEM brings in interesting information to help a content author create better content. Content Insight brings charts about how your content is doing on the site or it could be a list of recommendations from third party providers.  These providers (like BrightEdge) can seamlessly integrate with AEM when enabled.

App Authoring – or PhoneGap Enterprise combined with AEM – allows you to create and manage mobile apps right in AEM. The application also runs within AEM, but it really consists of components that you can combine to create the app.  These components are specific to the mobile app, so you wouldn’t use it on the web site.  The best use case for Apps is a content heavy site.  By using PhoneGap Enterprise, you can include Adobe Analytics in the Adobe Marketing Cloud to track usage of the mobile apps. Other Marketing Cloud components (like Campaigns) can also be leveraged.

Adobe has brought a lot of functionality from Scene 7 and baked it right into AEM.  Scene 7 is really useful for changing images on the fly for personalization among other items.  SpinSet is used to take images and make them into a 360 view.  All the image manipulation you can do in Scene 7 will be available in AEM directly.

Digital asset management has been enhanced with workflow that allows you to create tasks on the fly.  Tasks are integrated with the AEM dashboard.  When dealing with multiple assets – like picking a photo from photo shoot – you can see all the images on one page and then pick or approve the one you like best.

When integrated with the Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Social, you can find and manage social conversations from within AEM.  This is done by pushing external content into Adobe Social where you can create content, reply to conversations. Adobe Social calls this Unified Moderation.  You can correlate user profiles on the website with users on social media.

In addition the Adobe Social integration, there are some social features in AEM.  Now you will be able to moderate posts in forums and other places where users can make comments.  You can also translate comments through the same translation workflow as other content.

communities.adobe.com is now available to discover and support communities across the globe.  This feature is not just for AEM, but is useful for all Marketing Cloud products.  Adobe wants to have communities for Marketing professionals and web site owners as well as developers.

Building sites more efficiently using Developer Mode.  Adobe has developed tools to convert HTML into the components that AEM requires to build a site.  This would eliminate some steps needed today to translate a site’s design into actual usable components.  Tools are also included to help a developer understand how a page has been constructed, how long each component takes to load, and also see what code is being executed in the components.

Adobe is also including a new tag language that can help you create components without code.  These tags can grab data from the server and put it into the HTML at run time.  This looks similar to using JSP tags on a page.

Integration, Front-end Testing can also be done right within the interface.  Tests can be scripted and then run right within AEM.  This can eliminate some manual testing of web sites in the SDLC.  Results show you right in the interface where problems occurred.

There are new Heatlh Dashboards targeted for system admins.  The dashboard shows the status of various parts of AEM and highlights any areas where problems exist.  These dashboards can also show when maintenance tasks must be run.

Finally, Projects is a new feature. Projects group content together with other items, such as tasks, experiences, workflows, etc. These are presented as a Dashboard for the project so you don’t have to hunt for all these items across the AEM interface.

One of the first things I learned is that Adobe has grown tremendously over the past few years and has really cemented its place as the leader in digital content creation and marketing. What was made equally clear is that Adobe’s stable of world-class partners has been instrumental to Adobe’s success. In fact, joint engagements between Adobe and its partners were brought up numerous times as examples of customer successes. This was true across verticals (e.g., Retail, Media, and Financial) and Adobe solutions (Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud). Based on what I saw at the Worldwide Sales Conference, I expect Adobe will continue to engage with its digital agency and systems integration partners throughout 2014 and well into the future.

The second theme centered on the tremendous growth of digital marketing and the importance of creating a compelling and personalized customer experience. Marketers know that every interaction between a business and a customer is a marketing opportunity and a chance to drive revenue. The challenge is that customers control how, when and where they will interact with companies. In fact, customers use a multitude of channels (web, mobile, social, video) and devices (tablet, phone, computer) to engage with businesses. This creates a significant challenge for marketers to determine how and when to engage clients within each of these channels and provide a compelling reason for the customer to take the next step forward in the sales cycle. Adobe’s response to this was clear: Brands interested in driving significant revenue through digital channels must deliver the right message, to the right channel, at the right time. Creating this type of customer engagement requires a well-defined strategy and an enterprise-grade platform with deep solutions capabilities.

The final theme– which ran throughout the duration of the conference – was that Adobe’s strategy, vision, and product platforms – Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud – have made it possible for businesses to deliver the digital experiences that clients expect. First, I want to segue to a little history lesson that provides context to Adobe’s approach to digital marketing.

Adobe has a deep heritage in digital content creation solutions (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc). Legions of digital marketers have been using Adobe’s creative products to generate extremely rich and engaging digital content for many years. The challenge for those marketers was twofold: how to manage all of that content and how to get that content to their customers. Thus, the strategy and vision of Marketing Cloud was born.

The vision for Marketing Cloud was to provide marketers with one location to manage, publish, and analyze the content they were creating. The first strategic step towards the creation of Marketing Cloud was focused on organic product development and/or acquisition of market-leading content management, analytics, mobile, social, customer segmentation, media optimization, and marketing campaign orchestration solutions. The second step of the process involved seamless interoperability between the Marketing Cloud systems and the creation of a Touch Interface to manage everything. This provided marketers with a singular and actionable view of the customer and a singular interface for the management of all marketing processes and activities. The final step for Adobe was to integrate the full suite of solutions from Creative Cloud to Marketing Cloud. This created a unified content creation, management, and publishing system that covered the full marketing lifecycle. Adobe’s strategy and subsequent cloud-based platforms provide end-to-end solutions for creative and digital marketers. By having the right tools in place, marketers can deliver on their vision: to provide the right message, to the right person at the right time.

This conference offered an outstanding opportunity to learn more about Adobe’s business, their solutions offerings, and also engage with key members of teams. I came away from the conference with a fuller understanding of Adobe’s sales and product strategies along with their key value propositions and differentiators from others in their space. I’m excited to see how Adobe’s latest acquisition of Neolane – now Adobe Campaign – will help to orchestrate successful online and offline marketing campaigns designed to drive increased revenue for our clients. Based on the Adobe Campaign sessions I attended and the conversations I’ve had with clients since then, I anticipate tremendous success for this solution.